Publishing Chinese medicine knowledge as Linked Data on the Web

Journal article

Background: Chinese medicine (CM) draws growing attention from Western healthcare practitioner and patients. However, the integration of CM knowledge and Western medicine (WM) has been hindered by a barrier of languages and cultures as well as a lack of scientific evidence fro CM's efficacy and safety. In addition, most of CM knowledge published with relational database technology makes the integration of databases even more challenging.

Methods: Linked Data approach was used in publishing CM knowledge. This approach was applied to publishing a CM linked dataset, namely RDF-TCM http://www.open-biomed.org.uk/rdf-tcm/ based on TCMGeneDIT, which provided association information about CM in English.

Results: The Linked Data approach made CM knowledge accessible through standards-compliant interfaces to facilitate the bridging of CM and WM. The open and programmatically-accessible RDF-TCM facilitated the creation of new data mash-up and novel federated query applications.

Conclusion: Publishing CM knowledge in Linked Data provides a point of departure for integration of CM databases.

Authors: Zhao, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: BioMed Central
• Journal: Chinese Medicine
• Volume: 5
• Article number: 27
• Publication date: 2010-07-01
• Edition: Publisher's version
• DOI: 10.1186/1749-8546-5-27
• ISSN: 1749-8546
• Language: English
• Keywords: Chinese medicine; Linked Data
• Subjects: Bioinformatics (life sciences); Zoological sciences