This study used morphological analysis to develop a prototype which supports automatic mapping of nursing terminology. For that purpose, the author developed the prototype using Arirang Analyzer (Korean morpheme analyzer), Korean keyword extraction system, and the Basic Data of Korea Standard Health and Medical Terminology.
The whole process of the prototype development is, in accordance with the system development life cycle, as follows: requirements definition, design, implementation, test, and evaluation. As for requirements definition, the current status of health organizations were analyzed, literature was reviewed and related data was collected from opinion's interviews, so the purpose, configuration, operational conditions, and main features of the prototype were proposed. The prototype which consists of pre-processing, morphological analysis and nursing terminology mapping was designed using Spring framework, Java 1.6, and Apache Tomcat. It implemented to generate outcome such as mapped nursing term's code and its name in Korean and English. While doing the system test, those errors were debugged and properly improved according to language conversion rule. The system performance was evaluated with respect to expressiveness, use rate, use frequency, and mapping rate by using selected 673 nursing statements as for evaluation sample related to one specific nursing diagnosis. The findings of the mapped nursing terms demonstrate that 64.3% are conceptually expressed and 30.8% are partially expressed. In addition, the using rate of nursing terms is 9.4% and the mapping rate between the key-words used in the nursing statements and the suggested nursing terminology is 45.5%.
As for the further investigation, it is necessary to apply morphological analysis, syntax analysis, and machine learning to this kind of study to enhance the accuracy of mapping as automatic. In particular, it is also desirable to expand nursing axis and more specific terms for the adoption to the nursing environment in reality. These results show that this study contributes to the nursing terminology standardization and the knowledge accumulation through nursing records.