The thesaurus is available free of charge in two machine-readable formats: XML, which maps the full hierarchical structure, and CSV, which supports tabular processing. Both are published under the Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0 via the ZB MED Fachrepositorium Lebenswissenschaften, in line with the Open Science principle.

Who benefits:

• Researchers and medical professionals: uniform indexing makes literature searches more precise and connects German collections to international databases such as PubMed.
• Medical libraries, university faculties and hospitals: they rely on accurate retrieval of specialist literature.
• German medical publishers, the pharmaceutical industry and providers of biomedical text and data mining.

Relevance for AI applications: Because the data are machine-readable, the thesaurus is suited to semantic search, text mining and automatic indexing of German-language texts. Controlled vocabulary prevents costly misunderstandings: a German query about "Angina" usually means angina tonsillaris, whereas the English term "angina" typically refers to angina pectoris. The German MeSH links German terms and synonyms to defined international concepts with unique concept identifiers, so that AI systems rely on verified relationships rather than word-for-word translation. Medical searches become more comprehensible and their results more reliable.

The German MeSH 2026 can be downloaded from the Fachrepositorium Lebenswissenschaften. ZB MED will continue to update the German edition annually.

To the German MeSH:

XML 
CSV