Drug Ontology Research Articles

Enhancing Drug-Related Data Exchange: Advanced Technical Support for Interoperability.

This paper describes the technical support services developed to facilitate the usage of the Canadian Drug Ontology (OCRx). These services include a lookup service named PaperRx, which retrieves OCRx drug entities using description logic queries (DLqueries) conducted within OCRx's classified structure. Additionally, the services feature a SPARQL endpoint, an OWL file downloader, and a RESTful Application Programming Interface. This suite of services supports the application of the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles to OCRx.

Diabetic Drug ontology mapping for individual Diabetic Person and predict Insulin Dosage on Daily Basis

Managing diabetes requires a personalized treatment plan based on the patient's health records and drug usage effectively. In this paper, we have proposed accurate prediction of insulin dosage for diabetic patients daily by using ontology mapping with deep learning recurrent neural network models such as long short-term memory (LSTM), Gated recurrent unit( GRU), and Bidirectional long short-term memory(BiLSTM). The patient's information is arranged in a structured format. The structured ontology data provides a meaningful connection between patients' personal information, physical activity, insulin intake, carbohydrate intake and glucose level. The structured data is beneficial to take decisions effectively to recommend the insulin dosage level daily to avoid a sudden decrease in sugar level. The proposed LSTM model outperforms well on insulin prediction compared to GRU and BiLSTM models. The proposed model is very effective for diabetic personal care and improves patient outcomes and quality of life.

Improving the interoperability of drugs terminologies: Infusing local standardization with an international perspective

Objectives:The objective of this study is to describe how OCRx (Canadian Drug Ontology) has been built to address the dual need for local drug information integration in Canada and alignment with international standards requirements. Methods:This paper delves into (i) the implementation efforts to meet the Identification of Medicinal Product (IDMP) requirements in OCRx, alongside the ontology update strategy, (ii) the structure of the ontology itself, (iii) the alignment approach with several reference Knowledge Organization Systems, including SNOMED CT, RxNorm, and the list of “Code Identifiant de Spécialité” (CIS-Code), and (iv) the look-up services developed to facilitate its access and utilization. Results:Each OCRx release contains two distinct versions: the full and the up-to-date version. The full version encompasses all drugs with a DIN code sanctioned by Health Canada, while the up-to-date version is limited to drugs currently marketed in Canada. In the last release of OCRx, the full version comprises 162,400 classes; meanwhile, the up-to-date version consists of 36,909 classes. In terms of mappings with OCRx, substances in RxNorm and SNOMED CT fall below 40%, registering at 37% and 22% respectively. Meanwhile, mappings for CIS-Code achieve coverage of 61%. The strength mappings are notably low for RxNorm at 40% and for CIS-code at 28%. This affects the mapping of clinical drugs, which are predominantly alignable through post-coordinated expressions: 56% for RxNorm, 80% for SNOMED CT, and 35% for CIS-Code. The main support service of OCRx is a look-up service known as PaperRx that displays OCRx’s entities based on description logic queries (DL-queries) performed through the classified structure of OCRx. The look-up services also contain a SPARQL endpoint, an OCRx OWL file downloader, and a RESTful API. Discussion:The OCRx ontology demonstrates a significant effort towards integrating Canadian drug information with international standards. However, there are areas for improvement. In the future, our focus will be on refining the structure of OCRx for better classification capability and improvement of dosage conversion. Additionally, we aim to harness OCRx in constructing an ontology-based annotator, setting our sights on its deployment in real-world data integration scenarios.

Ontology-aware Prescription Recommendation in Treatment Pathways Using Multi-evidence Healthcare Data

For care of chronic diseases (e.g., depression, diabetes, hypertension), it is critical to identify effective treatment pathways that aim to promptly update the medication following the change of patient state and disease progression. This task is challenging because the optimal treatment pathway for each patient needs to be personalized due to the significant heterogeneity among individuals. Therefore, it is naturally promising to investigate how to use the abundant electronic health records to recommend effective and safe prescriptions. However, prescription recommendation needs to consider multiple aspects of life-critical evidence, such as the information relevance in terms of medical concepts, the health condition in terms of diagnosis history, and the further constraint in terms of side information (e.g., patient demographics and drug side effects). To this end, in this article, we propose a novel prescription recommendation framework named OntoPath to predict the next drug in disease treatment pathways, by building an ontology-aware hierarchical-attention model that integrates multiple medical evidence from domain knowledge guidance, medical history profiling, and side information utilization. Specifically, our method can be characterized from three aspects: (1) by incorporating the longitudinal diagnosis history, we enrich the profiling of patients in terms of comprehensive health conditions, which can largely influence a drug’s outcome on individual patients; (2) using the hierarchical disease and drug ontology structures, we are able to model the domain-specific relevance between patients and drugs at multiple levels of granularity and achieve in-depth collaborative filtering; (3) we introduce a pre-training stage to enhance the discriminativeness of network representations, which helps us obtain a premium model initialization to further boost the final recommendation training. We perform extensive experiments on a large-scale depression cohort with over 37,000 patients from a real-world medical claims database. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of OntoPath through the consistent outperformance over state-of-the-art prescription recommendation baselines and the interpretation of model mechanism in case studies.

The Prescription of Drug Ontology 2.0 (PDRO): More Than the Sum of Its Parts.

While drugs and related products have profoundly changed the lives of people around the world, ongoing challenges remain, including inappropriate use of a drug product. Inappropriate uses can be explained in part by ambiguous or incomplete information, for example, missing reasons for treatments, ambiguous information on how to take a medication, or lack of information on medication-related events outside the health care system. In order to fully assess the situation, data from multiple systems (electronic medical records, pharmacy and radiology information systems, laboratory management systems, etc.) from multiple organizations (outpatient clinics, hospitals, long-term care facilities, laboratories, pharmacies, registries, governments) on a large geographical scale is needed. Formal knowledge models like ontologies can help address such an information integration challenge. Existing approaches like the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership are discussed and contrasted with the use of ontologies and systems using them for data integration. The PRescription Drug Ontology 2.0 (PDRO 2.0) is then presented and entities that are paramount in addressing this problematic are described. Finally, the benefits of using PDRO are discussed through a series of exemplar situation.

OCRx: Canadian Drug Ontology.

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a Canadian drug ontology (OCRx), built to provide a normalized and standardized description of drugs that are authorized to be marketed in Canada. OCRx aims to improve the usability and interoperability of drugs terminologies for a non-ambiguous access to drugs information that is available in electronic health record systems. We present the first release of OCRx that is described in Web Ontology Language and aligned to the Identification of Medicinal Product (IDMP) standards. For comparison purposes, OCRx is mapped to RxNorm, its US variant.

Optimizing Antihypertensive Medication Classification in Electronic Health Record-Based Data: Classification System Development and Methodological Comparison.

BackgroundComputable phenotypes have the ability to utilize data within the electronic health record (EHR) to identify patients with certain characteristics. Many computable phenotypes rely on multiple types of data within the EHR including prescription drug information. Hypertension (HTN)-related computable phenotypes are particularly dependent on the correct classification of antihypertensive prescription drug information, as well as corresponding diagnoses and blood pressure information.ObjectiveThis study aimed to create an antihypertensive drug classification system to be utilized with EHR-based data as part of HTN-related computable phenotypes.MethodsWe compared 4 different antihypertensive drug classification systems based off of 4 different methodologies and terminologies, including 3 RxNorm Concept Unique Identifier (RxCUI)–based classifications and 1 medication name–based classification. The RxCUI-based classifications utilized data from (1) the Drug Ontology, (2) the new Medication Reference Terminology, and (3) the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System and DrugBank, whereas the medication name–based classification relied on antihypertensive drug names. Each classification system was applied to EHR-based prescription drug data from hypertensive patients in the OneFlorida Data Trust.ResultsThere were 13,627 unique RxCUIs and 8025 unique medication names from the 13,879,046 prescriptions. We observed a broad overlap between the 4 methods, with 84.1% (691/822) to 95.3% (695/729) of terms overlapping pairwise between the different classification methods. Key differences arose from drug products with multiple dosage forms, drug products with an indication of benign prostatic hyperplasia, drug products that contain more than 1 ingredient (combination products), and terms within the classification systems corresponding to retired or obsolete RxCUIs.ConclusionsIn total, 2 antihypertensive drug classifications were constructed, one based on RxCUIs and one based on medication name, that can be used in future computable phenotypes that require antihypertensive drug classifications.

Network based approach for discovering novel gene-phenotypic association and disease co morbidities using ontological data

Advancements in bio-techniques have accelerated the generation of genomic and proteomic data. High throughput experiments generate huge volume of biological data that lead to cutting edge researches. These data may be stored in hierarchical structures known as ontologies. Ontologies serve as rich knowledge sources for biological information mining. Annotations from Gene Ontology (GO), Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) and Drug Ontology are extensively used for biological studies including disease causing gene prediction, disease comorbidity analysis and drug designing purposes. Several mechanisms exist for extracting semantic similarity among ontological terms. Graph based approaches are mostly used for analyzing the semantic similarity between ontological terms. In this paper, a novel method has been proposed for predicting disease causing genes and disease comorbidities using GO and HPO data. Weighted association rules obtained from Gene Ontology and Human Phenotype Ontology are used for constructing weighted gene network and weighted phenotype network. These networks are then connected using known gene-phenotypic relationships. Modified random walk restart algorithm is performed on this network for extracting novel disease gene correlations and disease comorbidities. This method outperformed the existing methods that depend on similarity measurements.

Enhancing the drug ontology with semantically-rich representations of National Drug Codes and RxNorm unique concept identifiers

BackgroundThe Drug Ontology (DrOn) is a modular, extensible ontology of drug products, their ingredients, and their biological activity created to enable comparative effectiveness and health services researchers to query National Drug Codes (NDCs) that represent products by ingredient, by molecular disposition, by therapeutic disposition, and by physiological effect (e.g., diuretic). It is based on the RxNorm drug terminology maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, and on the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest ontology. Both national drug codes (NDCs) and RxNorm unique concept identifiers (RXCUIS) can undergo changes over time that can obfuscate their meaning when these identifiers occur in historic data. We present a new approach to modeling these entities within DrOn that will allow users of DrOn working with historic prescription data to more easily and correctly interpret that data.ResultsWe have implemented a full accounting of national drug codes and RxNorm unique concept identifiers as information content entities, and of the processes involved in managing their creation and changes. This includes an OWL file that implements and defines the classes necessary to model these entities. A separate file contains an instance-level prototype in OWL that demonstrates the feasibility of this approach to representing NDCs and RXCUIs and the processes of managing them by retrieving and representing several individual NDCs, both active and inactive, and the RXCUIs to which they are connected. We also demonstrate how historic information about these identifiers in DrOn can be easily retrieved using a simple SPARQL query.ConclusionsAn accurate model of how these identifiers operate in reality is a valuable addition to DrOn that enhances its usefulness as a knowledge management resource for working with historic data.

Domain ontology development of knowledge base in cardiovascular personalized health management

In China, cardiovascular disease has become the leading killer in recent years, and mortality from cardiovascular disease is continuing to rapidly increase. Extant medical research has proven that personal health management (prevention, intervention, and recuperation) of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, is the best strategy for their prevention and treatment. Currently, the public can obtain health management knowledge through the Internet, newspapers, books, and other channels. However, with the explosive growth of available information, the public is limited to obtain effective health management guidance due to the characteristics of multiple sources, uneven accuracy (even some contradictory knowledge) and a major paucity of personalization, especially for the general public who lack professional medical knowledge. To address these problems, this paper proposes a knowledge base framework (i.e. domain ontology library) of health management programs based on the cardiovascular disease domain, which can standardize knowledge of health management programs both logically and structurally. In order to satisfy the needs of personalized health management, the core ontology of the domain ontology library is health-management-program ontology. In addition to common ontologies (e.g. disease ontology, drug ontology, etc.), basic ontologies include the ontology of individual health characteristics (e.g. individual-health-characteristics and environmental-characteristics ontology), and ontologies comprising diet and sport (e.g. ingredients, recipes, physical exercise, etc.). We then construct the ontology library through the professional ontology tool, Protégé. With a case study, we translate a piece of text health management knowledge into instances of an ontology library. At the same time, we present a personalized health management program recommendation algorithm based on the ontology library, and a recommendation case is realized according to this algorithm. As a basic research, the results of this paper can also support other health management applications in the future.

Medical Event Representation and Reasoning for Chinese Clinical Guideline

Event is the hot topics in the study of clinical guidelines. In this paper, we define medical event narrowly from the view of medical operation and represent the event of clinical guideline in a format which can be understood by computer. Meanwhile, we mine hidden relationships between events with user-defined rules in Stardog. Then, we reason the next executable event by preforming SPARQL queries. We take a segment of Chinese clinical guideline as example and construct an event ontology to verify the feasibility of this framework. Furthermore, event knowledge is not only computerized in this framework, but also can link to drug ontology and disease ontology. So the event ontology can be used to some medical application such as intelligent drug recommendation system.

SemEHR: surfacing semantic data from clinical notes in electronic health records for tailored care, trial recruitment, and clinical research

BackgroundDeriving structured data from unstructured clinical notes in electronic health records (EHRs) requires natural language processing and clinical expertise, which is often costly, and frequently a one-off investment. We implemented SemEHR, a semantic search system that reduces the expertise and effort required in this context. We aimed to use it to characterise and select patients for projects such as the UK Department of Health 100,000 Genome Project. MethodsBuilt upon the off-the-shelf toolkits, Bio-YODIE and CogStack, SemEHR integrates heterogeneous EHR documents and identifies contextualised (negation, temporality, and experiencer) mentions of a wide range of biomedical concepts including SNOMED CT, ICD-10, LOINC, and Drug Ontology. Text mining and semantics techniques are incorporated to derive a longitudinal patient panorama, combining structured profiles and unstructured records, available through semantic search interfaces. FindingsWe deployed SemEHR in various UK hospital EHRs, including the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, where 46 million concept mentions were identified from 18 million documents. In a liver disease study, SemEHR identified 94 of 100 hepatitis C positive manually annotated patients. In a HIV study, SemEHR identified 21 of 23 true positives in a 1000-patient cohort. At King's College Hospital, SemEHR is being used to recruit patients into the 100,000 Genomes Project, where ontological associations are integrated to match recruitment criteria and populate complex phenotype models. A preliminary evaluation suggests that the tool is able to validate previously submitted cases and is very fast in searching phenotypes. InterpretationUsing SemEHR, a query such as “find patients with a family history of hepatitis C”, which previously might have required the user to have natural language processing expertise, becomes a simple search, for which SemEHR retrieves a relevant patient cohort, populates patient-level summaries, and provides a link to each mention in the original source. Results and feedback from the multiple studies have proven its efficiency: previously weeks or months of work can be done within minutes in some cases. FundingMedical Research Council (MC_PC_14089); NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health, Biomedical Research Unit for Dementia; the European Union's Horizon 2020 (No 644753 KConnect); Wellcome Trust Seed Award in Science (109823/Z/15/Z); National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospital's Biomedical Research Centre; Arthritis Research UK; British Heart Foundation; Cancer Research UK; Chief Scientist Office; Economic and Social Research Council; Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; National Institute for Social Care and Health Research; Wellcome Trust (grant MR/K006584/1).

IATC-mHyb: a hybrid multi-label classifier for predicting the classification of anatomical therapeutic chemicals.

Recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), drug compounds have been classified into 14 main ATC (Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical) classes according to their therapeutic and chemical characteristics. Given an uncharacterized compound, can we develop a computational method to fast identify which ATC class or classes it belongs to? The information thus obtained will timely help adjusting our focus and selection, significantly speeding up the drug development process. But this problem is by no means an easy one since some drug compounds may belong to two or more than two ATC classes. To address this problem, using the DO (Drug Ontology) approach based on the ChEBI (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest) database, we developed a predictor called iATC-mDO. Subsequently, hybridizing it with an existing drug ATC classifier, we constructed a predictor called iATC-mHyb. It has been demonstrated by the rigorous cross-validation and from five different measuring angles that iATC-mHyb is remarkably superior to the best existing predictor in identifying the ATC classes for drug compounds. To convenience most experimental scientists, a user-friendly web-server for iATC-mHyd has been established at http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/iATC-mHyb, by which users can easily get their desired results without the need to go through the complicated mathematical equations involved.

Therapeutic indications and other use-case-driven updates in the drug ontology: anti-malarials, anti-hypertensives, opioid analgesics, and a large term request

BackgroundThe Drug Ontology (DrOn) is an OWL2-based representation of drug products and their ingredients, mechanisms of action, strengths, and dose forms. We originally created DrOn for use cases in comparative effectiveness research, primarily to identify historically complete sets of United States National Drug Codes (NDCs) that represent packaged drug products, by the ingredient(s), mechanism(s) of action, and so on contained in those products. Although we had designed DrOn from the outset to carefully distinguish those entities that have a therapeutic indication from those entities that have a molecular mechanism of action, we had not previously represented in DrOn any particular therapeutic indication.ResultsIn this work, we add therapeutic indications for three research use cases: resistant hypertension, malaria, and opioid abuse research. We also added mechanisms of action for opioid analgesics and added 108 classes representing drug products in response to a large term request from the Program for Resistance, Immunology, Surveillance and Modeling of Malaria in Uganda (PRISM) project. The net result is a new version of DrOn, current to May 2016, that represents three major therapeutic classes of drugs and six new mechanisms of action.ConclusionsA therapeutic indication of a drug product is represented as a therapeutic function in DrOn. Adverse effects of drug products, as well as other therapeutic uses for which the drug product was not designed are dispositions. Our work provides a framework for representing additional therapeutic indications, adverse effects, and uses of drug products beyond their design. Our work also validated our past modeling decisions for specific types of mechanisms of action, namely effects mediated via receptor and/or enzyme binding. DrOn is available at: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/dron.owl. A smaller version without NDCs is available at: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/dron/dron-lite.owl

Toward a comprehensive drug ontology: extraction of drug-indication relations from diverse information sources

BackgroundDrug ontologies could help pharmaceutical researchers overcome information overload and speed the pace of drug discovery, thus benefiting the industry and patients alike. Drug-disease relations, specifically drug-indication relations, are a prime candidate for representation in ontologies. There is a wealth of available drug-indication information, but structuring and integrating it is challenging.ResultsWe created a drug-indication database (DID) of data from 12 openly available, commercially available, and proprietary information sources, integrated by terminological normalization to UMLS and other authorities. Across sources, there are 29,964 unique raw drug/chemical names, 10,938 unique raw indication ”target” terms, and 192,008 unique raw drug-indication pairs. Drug/chemical name normalization to CAS numbers or UMLS concepts reduced the unique name count to 91 or 85% of the raw count, respectively, 84% if combined. Indication ”target” normalization to UMLS ”phenotypic-type” concepts reduced the unique term count to 57% of the raw count. The 12 sources of raw data varied widely in coverage (numbers of unique drug/chemical and indication concepts and relations) generally consistent with the idiosyncrasies of each source, but had strikingly little overlap, suggesting that we successfully achieved source/raw data diversity.ConclusionsThe DID is a database of structured drug-indication relations intended to facilitate building practical, comprehensive, integrated drug ontologies. The DID itself is not an ontology, but could be converted to one more easily than the contributing raw data. Our methodology could be adapted to the creation of other structured drug-disease databases such as for contraindications, precautions, warnings, and side effects.

Ontology-based collection, representation and analysis of drug-associated neuropathy adverse events.

BackgroundNeuropathy often occurs following drug treatment such as chemotherapy. Severe instances of neuropathy can result in cessation of life-saving chemotherapy treatment.ResultsTo support data representation and analysis of drug-associated neuropathy adverse events (AEs), we developed the Ontology of Drug Neuropathy Adverse Events (ODNAE). ODNAE extends the Ontology of Adverse Events (OAE). Our combinatorial approach identified 215 US FDA-licensed small molecule drugs that induce signs and symptoms of various types of neuropathy. ODNAE imports related drugs from the Drug Ontology (DrON) with their chemical ingredients defined in ChEBI. ODNAE includes 139 drug mechanisms of action from NDF-RT and 186 biological processes represented in the Gene Ontology (GO). In total ODNAE contains 1579 terms. Our analysis of the ODNAE knowledge base shows neuropathy-inducing drugs classified under specific molecular entity groups, especially carbon, pnictogen, chalcogen, and heterocyclic compounds. The carbon drug group includes 127 organic chemical drugs. Thirty nine receptor agonist and antagonist terms were identified, including 4 pairs (31 drugs) of agonists and antagonists that share targets (e.g., adrenergic receptor, dopamine, serotonin, and sex hormone receptor). Many drugs regulate neurological system processes (e.g., negative regulation of dopamine or serotonin uptake). SPARQL scripts were used to query the ODNAE ontology knowledge base.ConclusionsODNAE is an effective platform for building a drug-induced neuropathy knowledge base and for analyzing the underlying mechanisms of drug-induced neuropathy. The ODNAE-based methods used in this study can also be extended to the representation and study of other categories of adverse events.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13326-016-0069-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

An accurate and precise representation of drug ingredients.

BackgroundIn previous work, we built the Drug Ontology (DrOn) to support comparative effectiveness research use cases. Here, we have updated our representation of ingredients to include both active ingredients (and their strengths) and excipients. Our update had three primary lines of work: 1) analysing and extracting excipients, 2) analysing and extracting strength information for active ingredients, and 3) representing the binding of active ingredients to cytochrome P450 isoenzymes as substrates and inhibitors of those enzymes.MethodsTo properly differentiate between excipients and active ingredients, we conducted an ontological analysis of the roles that various ingredients, including excipients, have in drug products. We used the value specification model of the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations to represent strengths of active ingredients and then analyzed RxNorm to extract excipient and strength information and modeled them according to the results of our analysis. We also analyzed and defined dispositions of molecules used in aggregate as active ingredients to bind cytochrome P450 isoenzymes.ResultsOur analysis of excipients led to 17 new classes representing the various roles that excipients can bear. We then extracted excipients from RxNorm and added them to DrOn for branded drugs. We found excipients for 5,743 branded drugs, covering ~27 % of the 21,191 branded drugs in DrOn.Our analysis of active ingredients resulted in another new class, active ingredient role. We also extracted strengths for all types of tablets, capsules, and caplets, resulting in strengths for 5,782 drug forms, covering ~41 % of the 14,035 total drug forms and accounting for ~97 % of the 5,970 tablets, capsules, and caplets in DrOn.We represented binding-as-substrate and binding-as-inhibitor dispositions to two cytochrome P450 (CYP) isoenzymes (CYP2C19 and CYP2D6) and linked these dispositions to 65 compounds. It is now possible to query DrOn automatically for all drug products that contain active ingredients whose molecular grains inhibit or are metabolized by a particular CYP isoenzyme.DrOn is open source and is available at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/dron.owl.

A 2013 workshop: vaccine and drug ontology studies (VDOS 2013)

The 2013 “Vaccine and Drug Ontology Studies” (VDOS 2013) international workshop series focuses on vaccine- and drug-related ontology modeling and applications. Drugs and vaccines have contributed to dramatic improvements in public health worldwide. Over the last decade, tremendous efforts have been made in the biomedical ontology community to ontologically represent various areas associated with vaccines and drugs – extending existing clinical terminology systems such as SNOMED, RxNorm, NDF-RT, and MedDRA, as well as developing new models such as Vaccine Ontology. The VDOS workshop series provides a platform for discussing innovative solutions as well as the challenges in the development and applications of biomedical ontologies for representing and analyzing drugs and vaccines, their administration, host immune responses, adverse events, and other related topics. The six full-length papers included in this thematic issue focuses on three main areas: (i) ontology development and representation, (ii) ontology mapping, maintaining and auditing, and (iii) ontology applications.

"침구갑을경(鍼灸甲乙經)"의 용어체계(用語體系)에 관한 연구

Objectives : In the traditional oriental medicine, efforts to utilize the knowledge system so called Ontology have been achieved for systemic researches and efficient propagation of knowledge on oriental medicine. So far, in Korea, studies on drug ontology, pathological ontology, Cold Damage ontology and diagnostic ontology had been implemented, however, any development of ontology in the field of Acupuncture &, Moxibustion has not been achieved. Methods : We used Microsoft Access to collect terms in ZhenJiuJiaYiJing. The terms are related to human body area and structure. And then we built relationship of 'part of' and 'criterion of acupuncture point location' between the terms. Result & Conclusions : The terms used to explain acupuncture points in order to describe the position of acupuncture point name in ZhenJiuJiaYiJing were 8 words concerning different name of acupuncture point(穴名) 109, body part name(人體部位名稱) 150, meridian(經脈) 6 and structure(構造物).

Building a drug ontology based on RxNorm and other sources.

BackgroundWe built the Drug Ontology (DrOn) because we required correct and consistent drug information in a format for use in semantic web applications, and no existing resource met this requirement or could be altered to meet it. One of the obstacles we faced when creating DrOn was the difficulty in reusing drug information from existing sources. The primary external source we have used at this stage in DrOn’s development is RxNorm, a standard drug terminology curated by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). To build DrOn, we (1) mined data from historical releases of RxNorm and (2) mapped many RxNorm entities to Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) classes, pulling relevant information from ChEBI while doing so.ResultsWe built DrOn in a modular fashion to facilitate simpler extension and development of the ontology and to allow reasoning and construction to scale. Classes derived from each source are serialized in separate modules. For example, the classes in DrOn that are programmatically derived from RxNorm are stored in a separate module and subsumed by classes in a manually-curated, realist, upper-level module of DrOn with terms such as 'clinical drug role’, 'tablet’, 'capsule’, etc.ConclusionsDrOn is a modular, extensible ontology of drug products, their ingredients, and their biological activity that avoids many of the fundamental flaws found in other, similar artifacts and meets the requirements of our comparative-effectiveness research use-case.