This is a two year (2001/4-2003/3) funded project by the Health Sciences Research Grants for Medical Frontier Strategy Research at the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare. The research team consists of the ICNP® committee members of the Japanese Nursing Association. Main purposes of our project are to develop a necessary standardized Japanese nursing language system, and to contribute to the promotion of evidence based nursing practice in our country. While improving a language system necessary to accumulate and utilize nursing information in Japan, the project also aims at the further development of the ICNP®. Objectives related to the ICNP® are as follows: refinement of the translation; development of a thesaurus; examination of the structure; validation of the terms and definitions; and identification of additional terms. Suggestions are mainly collected from two groups of Japanese nurses: an expert panel and those who volunteer to participate in the study via Internet. In order to gather suggestions and send timely information via Internet, a Japanese ICNP® web site has been created. http://icnp.umin.jp/ Primary Investigator: Shigemi Kamitsuru (Japanese Nursing Association) Collaborators: Keiko Okaya (Japanese Nursing Association) Keiko Kazuma (Tokyo University) Mitsuko Matsuki (Japanese Red-Cross Hokkaido College of Nursing) Kikuko Ota (Keio University) Yumiko Uto (Kagoshima University) Fumiko Wako (Japanese Nursing Association) Masahiro Yanagida (Japanese Nursing Association)