Analyzing Ethnopharmacological Data Matrices on Traditional Uses of Medicinal Plants with the Contribution of Partial Order Techniques

Abstract

Undoubtedly, the use of ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological knowledge is of high priority worldwide, especially in fields such as drug development. Beginning in the 20th century, in the period of academic ethnobotany, the fields of ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology experienced a shift from the raw compilation of data to a greater methodological and conceptual reorientation. Nevertheless, a lot of ethnopharmacological knowledge is still unprocessed and there is plenty of space for handling this knowledge through several methodologies. Here we attempt to demonstrate an implementation of Partial Order Techniques, processing ethnopharmacological information, with the purpose to reveal inner structures and characteristics of raw data, which could potentially contribute in the conceptualization and management of ethnopharmacological knowledge. The results are promising, especially in the incorporation of rank order criteria in the classification of medicinal flora, in the revealing of trends in medicinal uses of closely related taxa, independently of whether the close relatedness is based on phylogeny or not, and in the comparison of ethnopharmacological data sets, revealing similarities in the order structure of the data.