GAIA-NCIt Terminology Files
The Global Alignment of Immunization safety Assessment in pregnancy (GAIA) is a global consortium coordinated by the Brighton Collaboration that focuses on developing common standards, guidance, and tools to strengthen programs of immunization in pregnancy. This work will enhance the science of vaccine research by providing standardized, validated, and objective methods for monitoring safety profiles and benefit-to-risk ratios of vaccines. These terminology sets are maintained and published as part of the NCI Thesaurus (NCIt).
The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Cancer Institute Enterprise Vocabulary Services (NCI EVS) have been collaborating with GAIA since 2014, to help develop standard terminology related to Fetal and Neonatal Events, Maternal Events, and Pregnancy Events and Outcomes. This expands on the Pediatric Terminology joint effort, ongoing since 2009, to establish a core library of harmonized pediatric terms that enable clinical investigators to more readily compare and aggregate data across clinical research portfolios. To this end, terminology data and draft standards were developed as part of the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIt) by experts from the NICHD, NCI EVS, and other participants. All NCIt content is freely available without restriction.
This data is in the form of concepts, which contain a cluster of core information that includes:
- NCIt Code: An unambiguous, unique, permanent alpha-numeric code assigned to every concept in the NCIt.
- NCIt Preferred Term: An unambiguous term that is assessed as the most widely used term in the biomedical community.
- NCIt Definition: A definition of the term as created by subject matter experts at NCI EVS.
- GAIA Preferred Term: The term chosen as the most widely used within the community requesting the subset.
- GAIA Synonym: The term chosen as equivalent to the preferred term.
- GAIA Definition: A definition of the term as created by subject matter experts from the organization requesting the term.
- GAIA Subset Code: The concept code for the subset.
- GAIA Subset Name: A descriptive name of the term group.
Concepts are grouped in named subsets. The subset name identifies area(s) of interest, such as GAIA Pathways to Preterm Birth Level of Diagnostic Certainty Terminology or GAIA Preterm Birth Level of Diagnostic Certainty Terminology, which is then easily extracted from the larger NCI Thesaurus. Subsets are published monthly in multiple formats on the NCI EVS ftp site. A link is provided at the bottom of this page to submit new requests or modifications. Update notifications are available via a subscription to the list-serv, also found at the bottom of this page.
GAIA-NCIt Terminology files available on this NCI EVS ftp site (https://evs.nci.nih.gov/ftp1/GAIA/) include:
- About.html This file.
- GAIA-NCIt_Terminology.xls
- GAIA-NCIt_Terminology.xlsx
- GAIA-NCIt_Terminology.txt (text format)
- GAIA-NCIt_Terminology_Changes.txt Text file of changes between the posted and the current version of GAIA terminology. For each change record, the Changes.txt contains a complete row of tab delimited data with the same data elements as described above. An "A" will precede any new concept additions, a "C" will precede any modification to existing concepts, and a "D" will precede any concepts that have been deleted.
- GAIA-NCIt_Terminology_Version.txt Text file that contains the version of NCI Thesaurus that corresponds to the current spreadsheet data. The database is reconciled the last Monday of every month. The files will be posted during the following two weeks. The version appears as YR.MOweek. An example is 11.02d which corresponds to the year 2011, the month of February, and the "d" refers to the fourth Monday of the month.
- Archive Directory of dated release versions.
Note: If there are no changes to the data for a particular month, the files will not be reposted. An update via the LISTSERV will be sent with this information.
Contact Information and Useful Links:
- Visit the Term Suggestion page to suggest a modification to an existing term or the addition of a term to a subset; please indicate GAIA as the project.
- To request help with these files, please send an email to this address: NCIThesaurus@mail.nih.gov.
- gaia-terminology-listserv has been created for end users' questions and for update notifications. Visit the LISTSERV website to subscribe to these updates.
- Visit the GAIA website for more information on the GAIA project.
- Visit the NCI EVS website for more information on the NCI Thesaurus and several projects with other partners.