Abstract
One of the biggest obstacles to progress in modern pharmaceutical research is the difficulty of integrating all available research findings into effective therapies for humans. Studies of traditionally used pharmacologically active plants and other substances in traditional medicines may be valuable sources of previously unknown compounds with therapeutic actions. However, the integration of findings from traditional medicines can be fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings. This article proposes an approach to use linked open data and Semantic Web technologies to address the heterogeneous data integration problem. The approach is based on our initial experiences with implementing an integrated web of data for a selected use-case, i.e., the identification of plant species used in Chinese medicine that indicate potential antidepressant activities.
Highlights
Ethnopharmacological findings are scattered over a multitude of publications and databases and are not well connected to other biomedical databases
Relevant databases have been converted their data into the Resource Description Framework (RDF)/Web Ontology Language (OWL) format
This effort is exemplified by DartGrid, a toolkit for exposing relational datasets in RDF/OWL format [4]
Summary
Ethnopharmacological findings are scattered over a multitude of publications and databases and are not well connected to other biomedical databases. The utility of these sources as knowledge resources are severely limited, which creates a further obstacle for modern day e-science research, which relies heavily on multiple heterogeneous data sources. Semantic technologies and standards, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [1] and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) [2] provide technology that has potential to be used to help tackle the problem [3]. Relevant databases have been converted their data into the RDF/OWL format. This effort is exemplified by DartGrid, a toolkit for exposing relational datasets in RDF/OWL format [4]. The public accessibility to many of these resources is limited.
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