COVID Term: A Bilingual Terminology for COVID-19

Abstract

Background: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a pneumonia caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2(SARS-CoV-2) has shown its destructiveness with more than one million confirmed cases and dozens of thousands of death, which is highly contagious and still spreading globally. World-wide studies have been conducted aiming to understand the COVID-19 mechanism, transmission, clinical features, etc. A cross-language terminology of COVID-19 is essential for improving knowledge sharing and scientific discovery dissemination.Methods: We developed a bilingual terminology of COVID-19 named COVID Term with mapping Chinese and English terms. The terminology was constructed as follows: (1) Classification schema design; (2) Concept representation model building; (3) Term source selection and term extraction; (4) Hierarchical structure construction; (5) Quality control (6) Web service. We built open access for the terminology, providing search, browse, and download services. Results: The proposed COVID Term include 10 categories: disease, anatomic site, clinical manifestation, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, living organism, qualifiers, psychological assistance, medical equipment, instruments and materials, epidemic prevention and control, diagnosis and treatment technique respectively. In total, COVID Terms covered 464 concepts with 724 Chinese terms and 887 English terms. All terms are openly available online (COVID Term URL: http://covidterm.imicams.ac.cn ). Conclusions: COVID Term is a bilingual terminology focused on COVID-19, the epidemic pneumonia with a high risk of infection around the world. It will provide updated bilingual terms of the disease to help health providers and medical professionals retrieve and exchange information and knowledge in multiple languages. COVID Term was released in machine-readable formats (e.g., XML and JSON), which would contribute to the information retrieval, machine translation and advanced intelligent techniques application. Keywords: COVID-19, Terminology System, Bilingual, Medical Terminology

Glosario De Términos Sobre El Covid-19

“…Durante esta época de pandemia, el objetivo es que las personas puedan comprender el mensaje y las medidas sanitarias; para ello, es importante conocer el significado de los términos para así evitar confusiones. Para ello, el primer paso es que los expertos, en este caso los médicos de las diferentes especialidades involucradas en temas relacionados a enfermedades infecciosas y pandemias, unifiquen criterios y los mismos significados para los nuevos términos que se puedan agregar, de lo contrario esto solo crearía dudas y confusión en la opinión pública (Ma et al, 2020).…”

“…Se ha podido comprobar que cuando los mensajes se transmiten de esta manera se reduce el nivel de cumplimiento de las medidas de prevención y de tratamiento incluso más que cuando se admite que no se conoce cabalmente la enfermedad (Ritov & Baron, 1990;Han et al, 2018). Además, una lista de términos actualizados sobre el COVID-19 ayudaría a los profesionales de la salud y que y otros profesionales que trabajan en esta área, a intercambiar información y conocimientos sobre el tema (Ma et al, 2020).…”