Background: Automatic coding of medical terms is an important, but highly complicated and laborious task.
Objectives: To compare and evaluate different strategies a framework with a standardized web-interface was created. Two UMLS mapping strategies are compared to demonstrate the interface.
Methods: The framework is a Java Spring application running on a Tomcat application server. It accepts different parameters and returns results in JSON format. To demonstrate the framework, a list of medical data items was mapped by two different methods: similarity search in a large table of terminology codes versus search in a manually curated repository. These mappings were reviewed by a specialist.
Results: The evaluation shows that the framework is flexible (due to standardized interfaces like HTTP and JSON), performant and reliable. Accuracy of automatically assigned codes is limited (up to 40%).
Conclusion: Combining different semantic mappers into a standardized Web-API is feasible. This framework can be easily enhanced due to its modular design.