Defining and Relating Concepts in Medical Terminology: A Case Study on the Gut–Brain Interplay

This contribution describes the terminology work carried out to analyze the conceptual dimension of terminology concerning the gut–brain interplay and associated neurodegenerative and mental health- related conditions. We present: 1) the methodology used to formulate intensional definitions of biomed- ical concepts, and 2) the approach used to identify associative relations between concepts in biomedical literature, along with a proposed typology of these relations. The biomedical concepts and the associative relations established between them are then compared with their respective representation in the Hered- itary Ontology (HERO), which is the only formal resource specifically designed to model knowledge on the gut–brain interplay and associated medical conditions. The comparison between terminological data and data contained in the ontology sheds light on the distinct nature of terminological and ontological representations of specialized knowledge, highlighting both differences and points of intersection. This work constitutes a preliminary step toward the future development of a novel terminology resource, aimed at representing specialized knowledge on the gut–brain interplay and related conditions.