On Jun 5, 2006, at 1:00 PM, Olivier Bodenreider wrote:
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.
For these very important reasons, I direct your (and others)
attention to W3C's work on SKOS. Think of SKOS as an RDF vocabulary
for thesauri.
[[
SKOS is an area of work developing specifications and standards to
support the use of knowledge organisation systems (KOS) such as
thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies,
other types of controlled vocabulary, and perhaps also terminologies
and glossaries, within the framework of the Semantic Web.
]]
-- http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
Often times when constructing thesauri, classification schemes,
taxonomies, etc. you don't necessarily (as Olivier states) want to
license the inferencing capabilities of OWL. A common way of exposing
and making explicit these thesauri relationships in terms of the
Semantic Web is exactly what SKOS is designed for.
I think representing UMLS in terms of SKOS would be a very powerful
enabler for the HCLSIG community.
--eric
