Source
Image Bioinformatics Research Group, Department of Zoology, Oxford University, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PS, UK. jun.zhao@zoo.ox.ac.uk.
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 http://www.open-biomed.org.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.