TCM masters miner for knowledge transfer

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a rich knowledge about human health and disease by its special way evolved along a very long history. As modern medicine is achieving much progress, arguments and disputes toward TCM never ends. To avoid losing lots of precious knowledge of TCM masters, endeavors have been engaged to systematic collection of those knowledge of TCM masters, such as their growth experiences, effective practical cases toward sickness and typical therapeutic principles and methods. Various knowledge mining has been expected to explore some useful or hidden patterns to unveil some mysteries of TCM system. This paper describes a computerized tool, TCM Master Miner, which applies different analytical methods to those collected materials about some living TCM masters in China mainland to show a different way of exposing essential ideas of those TCM masters by correspondence visualization which aims to help people understand TCM holistic views toward disease and body, and facilitate tacit knowledge transfer and sense-making of the TCM essence. This work is one kind of qualitative meta-synthesis of TCM masters' knowledge.