Toward Terminology as Infrastructure

In the near future, high-level meetings at cancer care and research enterprises may be distracted by discussions of the terminology computers use to support collaborative interactions. Because the productivity of these enterprises will depend on comprehensive and timely terminology, discussions of terminology shortfalls may dominate management discussions until they are overcome and creating and maintaining quality terminology become part of the enterprise infrastructure. Because cancer research and care is necessarily broadly collaborative, this may happen to cancer enterprises before it happens to most other biomedical and healthcare enterprises.