Towards Semantic e-Science for Traditional Chinese Medicine

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recent advances in Web and information technologies with the increasing decentralization of organizational structures have resulted in massive amounts of information resources and domain-specific services in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The massive volume and diversity of information and services available have made it difficult to achieve seamless and interoperable e-Science for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. Therefore, information integration and service coordination are two major challenges in e-Science for TCM. We still lack sophisticated approaches to integrate scientific data and services for TCM e-Science.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present a comprehensive approach to build dynamic and extendable e-Science applications for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM based on semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The semantic e-Science infrastructure for TCM supports large-scale database integration and service coordination in a virtual organization. We use domain ontologies to integrate TCM database resources and services in a semantic cyberspace and deliver a semantically superior experience including browsing, searching, querying and knowledge discovering to users. We have developed a collection of semantic-based toolkits to facilitate TCM scientists and researchers in information sharing and collaborative research.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Semantic and knowledge-based techniques are suitable to knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. It's possible to build on-demand e-Science system for TCM based on existing semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The presented approach in the paper integrates heterogeneous distributed TCM databases and services, and provides scientists with semantically superior experience to support collaborative research in TCM discipline.</p

Semantic Web based Content Enrichment and Knowledge Reuse in e-Science

We address the life cycle of semantic web based knowledge management from ontology modelling to instance generation and re-use. We illustrate through a semantic web based knowledge management approach the potential of applying semantic web technologies in Geodise, an e-Science pilot project in the domain of Engineering Design Search and Optimization (EDSO). In particular, we show how on-tologies and semantically enriched instances are acquired through knowledge acquisition and resource annotation. This is illustrated not only in Protégé with OWL plug-in but in a light weight function annotator customized for resource providers to semantically describe their own resources to be published. In term of the reuse, advice mechanisms in particular a knowledge advisor based on semantic matching are designed to consume the semantic information and facilitate service discovery, assembly and configuration in a real problem solving environment. An implementation has demonstrated the integration of the advisor in a text mode domain script editor and a GUI mode workflow composition environment. Our research work shows the potential of using semantic web technology to manage and reuse knowledge in e-Science