Peter Ansell wrote:
2008/7/22 Olivier Bodenreider <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
[...]
Regarding the UMLS Metathesaurus, there are various kinds of restrictions
listed in the license agreement
(http://wwwcf.nlm.nih.gov/umlslicense/snomed/license.cfm), which is why most
UMLS-based services (e.g., Knowledge Source Server GUI and API, MetaMap,
etc.) require authentication. There have been discussions for a while here
at NLM about providing a subset of the UMLS that could be freely
distributed. Currently, such source vocabularies (with "source restriction
level = 0") can be easily extracted from the Metathesaurus using
MetamorphoSys. As you mention, SNOMED CT, while freely available in the
member countries of the IHTSDO, cannot be made publicly available.
I have plans to work on an RDF version of MeSH that could be made publicly
available. EricN has encouraged me to do it for quite some time now, but I
haven't still done it yet.
Even through SNOMED CT cannot be made available as a, say, RDF endpoint, I
think it is still useful to consider (non-dereferenceable) URIs based on
SNOMED CT concept identifiers for annotation purposes in Semantic Web
applications.
How is it legal to utilise identifiers based on SNOMED for work done
outside the US? The license agreement seems to restrict these things
as you would never be able to create the non-dereferenceable
identifiers or search them without them being a derivative of what
seems to be a heavily restricted data set.
I am not a lawyer, but as I understand it, the license agreement
prevents anyone (but the IHTSDO) to make SNOMED CT available "to the
world" in any form. It does not however, as pointed out by John Madden,
prevent a user from some IHTSDO member country to map a dataset to
SNOMED CT (i.e., to enrich this dataset with SNOMED CT identifiers) and
make this dataset available outside IHTSDO member countries. Depending
on the use case, a SNOMED CT license might or might not be needed for
fully exploiting the dataset outside IHTSDO member countries.
I agree, however, that it would be good to have the IHTSDO confirm the
universal legality of SNOMED CT-based URIs. It would be even better if
the IHTSDO would create, maintain and promote such SNOMED CT-based URIs.
What this group (HCLS) could contribute is a series of use cases
justifying the involvement of the IHTSDO.
On the note of MeSH is what Bio2RDF have done to it illegal in any way
when it is intended for universal redistribution? [1]
Cheers,
Peter
[1] http://bio2rdf.org/download/
The English version of MeSH used in Bio2RDF is a "level 0 source", which
means that there are no specific restrictions attached to it (unlike
SNOMED CT, for example). MeSH is also publicly available outside the
UMLS, provided users agree with the following terms and conditions of
use: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/termscon.html, which I assume the
Bio2RDF did.
Beyond legality, one major issue to me is *authority*. While Bio2RDF did
an important and generally excellent job in converting various resources
to RDF, it is unclear to me 1) how long such an effort is sustainable
and 2) how reflective it is of the semantics of the original resource.
Quick example about 2): Entry terms in MeSH are generally not equivalent
to synonyms, but are labeled as such after conversion to RDF in Bio2RDF.
My point here is that, as much as possible, the originator of a resource
should take responsibility for its conversion to and sustained
availability in RDF. Again, this is NOT a criticism of Bio2RDF, but
rather my view of the information sources.
-- Olivier
