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Physician-patient communication, essential to achieving good health outcomes, can become complicated when a native language is not shared, as is the case for many Latino patients in the United States. This communication is then enriched, but also hindered, by the diverse Latino dialects that arise in the discourse. Thus, it is imperative that providers have access to resources that promote effective communication. Until recently most medical Spanish resources have focused mainly on standard language, ignoring the use of dialect and lexical variants. This paper will briefly discuss lexical variants in the medical setting along with the challenges introduced when including them in reference materials. Then, some of the medical professionals’ needs regarding reference resources will be presented, followed by a few weaknesses inherent in those currently in use. Finally, a proposal will be offered for a system that takes these needs into consideration and seeks to facilitate the medical discourse.

This paper focuses on the construction of ontologies for terminological purposes, and more precisely, on the design criteria and methodologies that can be adopted to this end. Therefore, we will outline some important design criteria and compare some relevant methodologies, with respect to five factors; on the basis of that study, we will propose our own methodology, designed to build ontology-based multilingual terminology resources.