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The terminology that is used to index the world's biomedical literature has its roots in an indexing system developed in the late nineteenth century. In the early 1960s that terminology, now known as the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), was updated and reframed for information retrieval purposes in the context of MEDLINE, the US National Library of Medicine's bibliographic retrieval system. MeSH is a semantic system in its own right and responds, just as all such systems do, to both internal and external forces. We conducted a study of the evolution of MeSH over the last 45 years. We hypothesized, and our analyses confirmed, that some changes reflect internal considerations, such as developing a more principled ontological structure, and others reflect important external forces, most notably the development of biomedical knowledge itself. Our work has implications for research in ontology evolution and for research that is concerned with the conceptual modeling and evolution of a knowledge domain.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-34997-3_10

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