Description of Wanda Pratt’s research project
Dynacat: Dynamically Categorizing Search Results

In Wanda’s words:
Please see Wanda's website: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~pratt

In my words:
When searching medical information from journals using resources such as MEDLINE/PubMed, there is so much information that physicians, researchers, or patients run into problems finding what they need.

Using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the user’s query of medical information can be improved and the search results returned in a categorized manner which is more helpful than typical search engine ranked results or document cluster results.

Description of what Christine and I will be doing:

1. Determine the best RDBMS to hold the UMLS for the purposes of Dynacat
   
2. Download and uncompress the UMLS
   
3. Download and install MySQL (or the chosen RDBMS)
   
4. Figure out how to load the UMLS into MySQL
   
5. Test with small database
   
6. Load the UMLS into MySQL
   
7. Access the database remotely using JDBC
   
8. Learn about the Dynacat implementation (currently a Java servlet)
   
9. Update the servlet to use the local database instead of the UMLS API