Just a few clarifications. First of all, I'm not an expert in TCM. Also,
herbal medicine is not just restricted to TCM, but it has a global
interest (in other Asian and European countries). TCM includes other
areas than herbal medicine, such as acupuncture .... Right now we try to
limit our scope to herbal medicine as it has a potentially strong
connection with western drugs and it may be easier for us to start.
I agree that it's hard to do the mapping and it's not possible (and
there is no need) to do all the mappings. Huajun said: "But in some
cases, it may work." What are these cases? I've been pondering on this a
little bit. I also found the following article interesting:
http://www.acupuncturetoday.com/mpacms/at/article.php?id=28184
I'm particularly attracted to the "TCM formulas" section. It mentions
that "TCM regards treating the kidney as particularly important in aging
disorders." In TCM, "zang" refers to "yin" organs" and "fu" refers to
"yang" organs. It's interesting that brain is not mentioned as one of
these organs. In fact, some Chinese herbalists told me that the
brain/mind is tightly linked with zangs (yin organs). It is also
interesting that there are differences between Zang Fu anatomy and
western anatomy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zang_Fu#Major_differences_between_Zang_Fu_anatomy_and_western_anatomy
For possible mappings (although some of the mappings may seem to be
fuzzy/uncertain) between TCM and mainstream medicine, mappings between
Zhang Fu anatomy and western anatomy may be a possible place to start.
Just a suggestion. I agree that it may still be difficult ...
Another thing that interests me in the TCM formulas section of the
above paper is that it mentions several formulas for Alzheimer's (there
any many other formulas). Basically a formula is a mixture of herbs. As
Huajun mentioned, a chemical compound database for these herbs may be of
interest to western drug researchers. Also, as Matthias pointed out this
might help lead to novel drug discovery strategies in AD. In the case of
Huperzine A, it may be interesting to see if there is any difference in
terms of potency between the natural (herb) form of Huperzine A vs. the
synthetic form of Huperzine A. It may also be interesting to compare the
mixture approach (TCM formulas) vs. the reductionist approach adopted by
western drug research. I wonder how much of David Ho's cocktail drug
approach to treating HIV/AIDS was influenced (or not influenced at all)
by this mixture approach. I heard that some western drug researchers
working in the US/Europe have applied some of the TCM philosophy in
their drug research ...
Just my two cents,
-Kei
Huajun Chen @ Zhejiang University wrote:
In some cases, this approach works, but in perhaps more cases, it doesn't.
I don't think we need and could find out correspondence between all
concepts in Chinese medicine and Western medicine, as TCM has a
different concept framework for describing many things. I also do not
think we can figure out a universal, common ontology that can span
over these two language systems (It may still be doable to some
extend, but it would be very hard).
By cross-culture data integration, i do not mean cross-language
ontology translation (which is also an challenge, important, and
useful of course). Instead, it might be more essential and doable to
find out connection hubs or correlation points between them. For
example, the disease description may serve as one such type of
connection point. Another example is the chemical compound database
for herb. We only do translation and mapping at the hub nodes, so
that a TCM researcher can explore relevant western medicine resource
(still in English), and a western medicine researcher can explore
relevant TCM resource (maybe still in Chinese if they can understand).
Best, huajun
On 5/29/08, eric neumann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Why not simply use to following trick on top of universal symbols?
<umls:male
rdfs:label="male" lang="en"
rdfs:label="Mann" lang="ge"
rdfs:label="mâle" lang="fr"
rdfs:label="男性" lang="zh-Hans"
...
Eric
2008/5/28 Jack Park <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
In cross-language data integration, it may be a simple matter of using a
multitude of language-scoped labels in an ontology. Another approach
that has been mentioned on this list many moons back by the late Bill
Bugg was that of applying topic maps to the federation of heterogeneous
resources, including disparate ontologies that don't easily merge, and
data sets. Bill was referring to some of my work. Topic maps provide the
ability to apply as many different names to some entity as necessary for
all participants to successfully locate what they seek. At the same
time, topic maps can federate each entity with external comments,
dialogues (such as this email message), bookmarks (tags) and
relationships with other entities.
Jack
Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
Huajun [EMAIL PROTECTED] University wrote:
Another challenge is cross-language data integration, which is actually
a
job that ontology should do.
I honestly disagree. Ontology is about the semantics of *being* but that
of symbols. It doesn't matter if how "gene" is called, named, or
written. It symbolize the same objective entities. A URI such as
http://www.example.com is not written in English. It is just a bunch of
symbols. Let's not introduce linguistic issues into data integration,
which already have a lot of issues.
Xiaoshu Wang
Best wishes, huajun
-----邮件原件-----
发件人: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 代表
Matthias Samwald
发送时间: 2008年5月26日 21:22
收件人: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Tim Clark
抄送: M. Scott Marshall; public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
主题: Re: KB note
Speaking of national boundaries, I wonder if alternative medicine
(e.g.,
herbal
medicine) would also be of interest to this community. For example,
Huperzine
is a drug derived from the herb Huperzia serrata. I also wonder if
there
are
hypotheses regarding the study of herbs in the possible treatment of
neurological diseases.
I would also be very motivated to help in this kind of research.
Specifically, Huperzine A would be a very interesting use-case for our
developments. It is a herbal compound with a history in folk medicine
and is
available OTC in most countries, yet it rivals the effectiveness of
currently leading Alzheimer medications such as Tacrine. It also has a
dual
mode of action that does not only involve acetylcholinesterase
inhibition,
but also modulation of the NMDA receptor. The implications of this for
the
treatment of Alzheimer's are still a rather hot topic.
The integration of knowledge from traditional medicine, plant
taxonomy/phylogeny/biochemistry and receptor binding databases (PDSP Ki
database, IUPHAR) could lead to the identification of some extremely
novel
therapeutic strategies. Finding candidate molecules in such a way might
be
much more effective than weeding through libraries of compounds
generated by
combinatorial synthesis etc. The challenge lies in the integration of
some
very heterogenous datasets that come from vastly different disciplines,
which is exactly the field of research where Semantic Web technologies
are
most effective.
I guess the major problem for this kind of research is that there are
no
funding programmes that span China, the US and Asia...
Cheers,
Matthias Samwald
DERI Galway, Ireland // Semantic Web Company, Austria
http://www.deri.ie/
http://www.semantic-web.at/
