A graphite holloway with thousands of overlapping pencil-strokes representing the meshed branches.
If A-Z MeSH branches are included in the process almost every relevant keyword is detected, although 1/3 of the terms are not relevant.
If no branches are associated to the MeSH term declaration, nine of the sixteen MeSH branches, A - G (Anatomy-Biological Sciences), N (Health Care) and Z (Geographic Locations) are associated by default, since they contain the most popular keywords for PubMed citation indexing.
Complete MeSH branches such as Publication Characteristics (V), Humanities (K) or Technology, Industry, Agriculture (J) for instance, could also be discarded within the identification process if users consider that they are not relevant.
At CDAPubMed, if a token, or consecutive tokens, is a MeSH term or synonym of the corresponding set of MeSH branches, this term is considered relevant for publication retrieval purposes, unless it is preceded by a negative expression, e.g. no Pain.
Two familiar resources looked promising: OMIM (11) and the MeSH 'Diseases' branch (7).
The CTD Disease vocabulary is a composite of both the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) and the MeSH Disease branch (15, 16).
For the latter, CTD manually reviewed and mapped OMIM disease terms to the MeSH Disease branch to produce a single unique vocabulary that allows inclusion of OMIM genetic diseases within a hierarchy that can be easily navigated between broad and granular disease levels (Davis et al., manuscript in preparation).
It still uses arboreal forms, but they now mesh with other overtly defined branching systems: a vascular network of arteries and veins with two plump kidneys, mushroom colonies and their germinating mycelia, neuron bundles and taxonomic diagrams, and raw pipelines connected to steel tanks and industrial valves.
Typical network topologies deployed in the past several years are ring, trunk-and-branch, festoon, and mesh, although individual networks vary significantly.
