Prospects and Challenges of Medicinal Plants Conservation and\ud Traditional Medicine in Tanzania

A qualitative study was carried to assess prospects and challenges of medicinal plants conservation and\ud traditional medicine in Tanzania. The study shows that TRM and medicinal have great prospects in healthcare\ud delivery worldwide. These prospects have more impact in developing countries where 70%-80% of population used\ud TRM for Primary Healthcare (PHC). It is reported that 25% of prescribed drugs in conventional healthcare were\ud derived from their ethnomedicinal use in TRM. Medicinal plants still provided hope for discovery of new drugs for\ud the resistant diseases and those that were not treated by conventional prescribed drugs. Traditional medicine and\ud medicinal plants were faced with challenges notably; threats due to increasing depletion of the natural resource\ud as an impact of population increase, urbanization, modernization of agriculture and climatic change. There was\ud erosion of indigenous medical knowledge as most of the traditional health practitioners were aging and dying, while\ud the expected youths to inherit the practice shy away from practice. The youths in rural settings who were willing\ud to practice some of them die because of AIDS. The other major challenges on traditional medicine and MPs were\ud constraints and include lack of data on seriously threatened and endangered medicinal plant species. Others include\ud inadequate and conflicting guidelines on management and utilization of natural resources, especially medicinal\ud plants. Efforts for scaling up the practice of TRM and medicinal plant conservation have been suggested. These\ud were creating awareness of the importance traditional medicine and medicinal plants in healthcare; training THPs\ud on good practices for provision of healthcare; conserving medicinal plants through in-situ and ex-situ programs and\ud sustainable harvesting of medicinal plants resources and training conventional health workers on the contribution\ud of TRM and medicinal plants in PHC. Traditional health practitioners, TRM and medicinal plants should be essential\ud components in PHC in order to meet the health millennium goals by 2025

Conceptual graph-based knowledge representation for supporting reasoning in African traditional medicine

Although African patients use both conventional or modern and traditional healthcare simultaneously, it has been proven that 80% of people rely on African traditional medicine (ATM). ATM includes medical activities stemming from practices, customs and traditions which were integral to the distinctive African cultures. It is based mainly on the oral transfer of knowledge, with the risk of losing critical knowledge. Moreover, practices differ according to the regions and the availability of medicinal plants. Therefore, it is necessary to compile tacit, disseminated and complex knowledge from various Tradi-Practitioners (TP) in order to determine interesting patterns for treating a given disease. Knowledge engineering methods for traditional medicine are useful to model suitably complex information needs, formalize knowledge of domain experts and highlight the effective practices for their integration to conventional medicine. The work described in this paper presents an approach which addresses two issues. First it aims at proposing a formal representation model of ATM knowledge and practices to facilitate their sharing and reusing. Then, it aims at providing a visual reasoning mechanism for selecting best available procedures and medicinal plants to treat diseases. The approach is based on the use of the Delphi method for capturing knowledge from various experts which necessitate reaching a consensus. Conceptual graph formalism is used to model ATM knowledge with visual reasoning capabilities and processes. The nested conceptual graphs are used to visually express the semantic meaning of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) constructs that are useful for formal specification of temporal properties of ATM domain knowledge. Our approach presents the advantage of mitigating knowledge loss with conceptual development assistance to improve the quality of ATM care (medical diagnosis and therapeutics), but also patient safety (drug monitoring)

Malaysian medicinal plant leaf shape identification and classification

Malaysian medicinal plants may be abundant natural resources but there has not been much research done on preserving the knowledge of these medicinal plants which enables general public to know the leaf using computing capability.This study proposes a framework to identify and classify tropical medicinal plants in Malaysia based the extracted patterns from the leaf.The extracted patterns from medicinal plant leaf are obtained based on several angle features.Five classifiers, obtained from WEKA and an ensemble classifier, called Direct Ensemble Classifier for Imbalanced Multiclass Learning (DECIML), are used to compare their performance accuracies over this data.In this experiment, five species of Malaysian medicinal plants are identified and classified in which each species will be represented by using 65 images.This study is important in order to assist local community to utilize the knowledge discovery and application of Malaysian medicinal plants for future generation

Ethnobotany Database: Exploring Diversity Medicinal Plants of Dayak Tribe Borneo

This study aimed to collect data and information of the Ethnobotany Dayak Tribe, in particular, development of the database which can be used as a media explorer for exchange information society on Borneo's biodiversity and in an attempt preserving of culture local wisdom in traditional medicine so that not extinction. Ethnobotany database collected from various scientific literature, results of report ethnobotany from Related institutions, field study, journals available in the text form, and local wisdom culture of the Dayak tribe. database system development methodology using to the software engineering framework model, with representation standard data model for taxonomic information refer to International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (Melbourne Code). To date, data has been collected as many as 233 species records from45 ethnic Dayak, with datasets; plant species, family name, identification, taxonomy ID from NCBI, geographical occurrence,plant parts used, ethnobotany importance, morphological characteristics, local name, the efficacy of medicinal plants, chemical values, distribution, locations, data sources, references, and descriptions related to the medicinal plants

The doctoral research abstract. Vol:9 2016 / Institute of Graduate Studies, UiTM

FOREWORD: Seventy three doctoral graduands will be receiving their scroll today signifying their achievements in completing their PhD journey. The novelty of their research is shared with you through The Doctoral Abstracts on this auspicious occasion, UiTM 84th Convocation. We are indeed proud that another 73 scholarly contributions to the world of knowledge and innovation have taken place through their doctoral research ranging from Science and Technology, Business and Administration, and Social Science and Humanities. As we rejoice and celebrate your achievement, we would like to acknowledge dearly departed Dr Halimi Zakaria’s scholarly contribution entitled “Impact of Antecedent Factors on Collaborative Technologies Usage among Academic Researchers in Malaysian Research Universities”. He has left behind his discovery to be used by other researchers in their quest of pursuing research in the same area, a discovery that his family can be proud of. Graduands, earning your PhD is not the end of discovering new ideas, invention or innovation but rather the start of discovering something new. Enjoy every moment of its discovery and embrace that life is full of mystery and treasure that is waiting for you to unfold. As you unfold life’s mystery, remember you have a friend to count on, and that friend is UiTM. Congratulations for completing this academic journey. Keep UiTM close to your heart and be our ambassador wherever you go. / Prof Emeritus Dato’ Dr Hassan Said Vice Chancellor Universiti Teknologi MAR

CONSTRUCTING SOCIOTECHNICAL TRANSITIONS TOWARD SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE: LESSONS FROM ECOLOGICAL PRODUCTION OF MEDICINAL PLANTS IN SOUTHERN BRAZIL

International audienceThis paper provides an analysis of knowledge generation and ‘novelty production' into new social arrangements within a sociotechnical transition scenario. The purpose is to contribute to the debate about convergences between creativity, learning and collective action for enhancing the sustainability into agriculture. By raising a Multilevel, Multi-actor and Multi-aspect analytic framework, built with elements from Multilevel Perspective and Actor Oriented Approach, we have examined emerging ‘novelties' generated by family farmers who have been producing medicinal plants under ecological systems in the Southern of Brazil. This production system was considered as a novelty, being composed by a ‘web of novelties', i.e. as integrated whole of new techniques and social practices that are at odds with prevalent sociotechnical regime. The ‘novelty production' depends on dynamic learning processes, related to knowledge contextualization, enabled through the mobilization of social networks, crucial for creating opportunities to bring together different bodies of knowledge. Farmers and other actors are creating spaces of autonomy in which we recognized some characteristics of ‘niche of innovation', a social space where rules and institutional apparatus can be ignored; it is a privileged locus for innovativity. Otherwise there are difficulties in stabilizing specific networks around ‘medicinal plants', in this way it will be necessary to create political and social conditions in order to involve actors from several domains, like researchers, extensionists, consumers and policy makers. Farmers in seeking autonomy are renewing the agriculture as an activity rooted locally and contributing to generate potential transitions to prevalent sociotechnical regime

Cheminformatics: A Patentometric Analysis

Cheminformatics has entrenched itself as a core discipline within chemistry, biology, and allied sciences, more particularly in the field of Drug Design Discovery and Development. The article begins with a patent analysis of the progressing field of cheminformatics from 1996 to early 2021 using the Relecura and Lens patent database. It proceeds with a description of patents in various domains and aspects. The eye-catching mind map shows the landscape of cheminformatics patent search. The results reveal the star rating-wise patent counts and the trends in the sub-technological research areas. At the end of the article, quantum clustering and eminent directions towards the future of cheminformatics have been discussed. This study would provide the directions to academicians, techno enthusiasts, researchers, stakeholders, or investors and helps increase the awareness of the potential of cheminformatics and quantum clustering