Biomedical Thesaurus

[Peter M. Woollard]

Hi, 
    Does anyone know of a publically available biomedical
thesaurus?

For searching keyword sections of many molecular
biology and medical databases it would be useful to
have the option to automatically search alternative
names for an object.

Examples:

1) If a molecule, enzyme or pharmaceutical change name.
2) British English and American English biomedical terms.
3) Common misspellings.

I figured that this must have been done a number of times
already. I have looked in likely WWW sites, asked colleagues
and used WWW search engines, but have not come across
anything yet besides http://www.lxt.com/REFS/abstract.12.html .

Ideally this would be available in a simple ascii text format file;
e.g. identical terms on the same line.

I am not writing a search engine myself, I merely thought that
this would be a useful addition to sequence annotation and similar
databank, database search engines; and raised this point
with the co-author of one.


Thanks in advance,
                  Peter Woollard
 
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Bioinformatics,                    Internet: p.woollard at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk
UK MRC Human Genome Mapping Project    http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/
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