On Jun 5, 2006, at 1:04 PM, Miller, Michael D (Rosetta) wrote:
Hi Ben and Matt,
An RDF version of the
UMLS knowledge sources would be seem to be very useful - at
least for
bioinformatics research purposes ...
What I was trying to discover was, from a purely RDF/ontology
standpoint, what is gained without any other knowledge of UMLS?
1) Accessible URIs for UMLS terms would make it possible (easier..)
for any one to annotate their data through reference to this expertly
curated common vocabulary. This makes it much more likely that
people would actually do so - thus enabling serendipitous/automatic
data integration down the road.
2) Even without using the semantics of the relationships, the simple
fact that certain concepts are somehow associated with each other is
excellent fodder for computation and exploration.
3) By providing RDF, it would be possible to automatically merge RDF
generated in other projects with the UMLS.
Did I miss any ?
This question comes more from my ignorance, probably, but when
knowledge
gets buried in specialized tags the tendency is that without going to
the source to understand the specialization, what's left is not all
that
useful.
There is no question that you would get maximum value out of a
thorough understanding of the meaning of all of the relationships in
the RDF and that the farther we can push this understanding into an
ontology (or other reasonable representation) the better; but, moving
things like the UMLS into RDF and onto the Web IMHO increases their
value to the community tremendously and is a necessary step towards
actually realizing the semantic web for the life sciences (not A
semantic web for the life sciences).
-Ben
