publishing chinese medicine knowledge as linked data on the web出版中医药知识关联数据在网络上.pdfVIP

Zhao Chinese Medicine 2010, 5:27 /content/5/1/27 RESEARCH Open Access Publishing Chinese medicine knowledge as Linked Data on the Web Jun Zhao Abstract Background: Chinese medicine (CM) draws growing attention from Western healthcare practitioners 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 for 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 .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. Background to data as what HTML is to documents, providing Chinese medicine (CM) is yet to become an integral descriptions about a resource in a machine-processable part of the standard healthcare system in Western coun- representation format. tries due to a lack of scientific evidence for its efficacy Linked Data promises a new and more efficient para- and safety as well as a language and cultural barrier. digm for sharing and connecting distributed data, per- This article pres