Benjamin Good wrote:
Are there any plans to release the UMLS or parts thereof as RDF / OWL ?
Not to my knowledge, Ben. And I certainly would be very cautious of any
attempt to doing it. The main reason is that many relations used for
creating hierarchies in biomedical vocabularies are not true
hierarchical relations (isa, part_of), but simply reflect the purpose
for which these terminologies were created. For example, it makes sense
in MeSH (i.e., for information retrieval) to have "accident prevention"
listed as a child of "accidents". It would be wrong to assume that all
child_of relations can be represented by subclassof relations. And an
accurate representation of MeSH in OWL would be difficult to obtain.
-- Olivier
