The first question: what is drug? Dailymed seems to deal with marketed
drugs at the FDA level, while drugbank seems to deal with drugs at the
chemical/pharmacological/pharmaceutical level. There seems to be
overlapping as well as unique parts between the two. Is the wikipedia
definition of drug enough (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug)? Do we
want philosophical, universal, practical, and/or context-specific
definition(s) of drug? Is herb belong to food or drug or both? If we
take the cultural context into account, the answer may vary. I don't
know if I've explained partly the proliferation of URI's (at least in
the context of drugs). What kind of solution(s) do we want, how much
time are we willing to wait, what kind of applications/use cases do we
want to develop? For example, some people are concerned about herb-drug
interactions ....
Just want to bring people's attention to the following meeting:
http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~cgcm2010/
Submission of abstracts are welcome
(http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~cgcm2010/abstracts.php). A limited number of
travel grants may be offered to graduate students/postdocs.
Cheers,
-Kei
François Scharffe wrote:
Hi,
I've recently played around with BioRDF and LODD datasets. I must say
I'm impressed by the number of datasets available. It's good to see
how the linked data can lead to interesting queries allowing to
discover new information. I particularly like the TCM examples [1].
I have a concern regarding the vocabularies used to published datasets.
On one side it seems there are plenty of biomedical ontologies like
the ones on the bioportal, but on the other side there are many
datasets that each use its own native schema without referring to
these ontologies.
Is there for example a reason why 'drugs' concepts in Dailymed and
Drugbank are different ? Why not reusing an existing ontology
describing drugs ? Is there actually a set of datasets reusing the
same ontology/ies ?
I'm actually working on ontology alignment so I'd be glad to help in
the aligning task. I must however admit that I'm not very
knowledgeable in the biomediacal domain.
Cheers,
François
[1] http://code.google.com/p/junsbriefcase/wiki/RDFTCMData
