Re: BioRDF Announcement

I
>
> 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.
>

And as an IHTSDO rep, I agree with Olivier on the above point. I  
honestly don't think one would want to "OWL-ize" SNOMED -- for various  
reasons, it would yield a result that wouldn't resemble any kind of  
OWL that anybody would ever come up with a priori.

To make it useful as OWL, among many other things, enormous numbers of  
supplementary axioms would have to be added, and this would be an  
"interpretive" activity that would change the meaning of the vocabulary.

But allowing mappings from OWL vocabs to SNOMED concepts (expressed as  
URI's according to some standard formula), probably just as annotation  
properties or using the SKOS vocab, might conceivably be worthwhile  
for some people.

I've put before the SNOMED Ed Board in the past a request to publish a  
standard formula for creating URI's out of SNOMED CT Identfiiers, but  
the request has not been a high priority.

I can do it again. I'd probably just ask them to state that SNOMED  
concepts could be represented "officially" as resources using a  
formula like:

http://www.ihtsdo.org/sct#  + the SCT identifier, which is a string of  
numerals, typically about 10 characters long.

What exactly such a resource "is", is a question for....somebody else.  
It certainly should NOT be mistaken for an rdfs:Class or an owl:Class.  
I think it might be identified as an instance of a skos:Concept.

Anybody want to suggest a better formula? SCT identifiers are intended  
to be stable, so while SNOMED does have versions, if there is a change  
in a concept, it is supposed to get a new SCT ID; hence I'd just as  
soon avoid the complications of indicating any versioning info in the  
URI.

John







> Olivier
>
>
>
> Chimezie Ogbuji wrote:
>> On 7/17/08 4:22 PM, "eric neumann" <ekneumann@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> As I had mentioned before, having all of NLM's MeSH and much of  
>>> UMLS available
>>> as RDF/SKOS/OWL for researchers would be very well received by the  
>>> growing SW
>>> community. I'd like to add this to the list of BioRDF activities  
>>> going
>>> forwards.
>>>
>>
>> Eric.
>> By UMLS, I'm assuming you mean the semantic network? Some time ago,  
>> I wrote
>> a translation of the UMLS semantic network into an OWL document  
>> that I would
>> be willing to contribute to the community, however, I wonder if  
>> there are
>> licensing restrictions with NLM's MeSH and UMLS Semantic Network  
>> that would
>> prevent the publication of a 'linkable' OWL ontology?
>>
>> In generally, I'm asking because I had done something similar with  
>> SNOMED-CT
>> and discovered (unless my understanding of the license is mistaken)  
>> that
>> licensing restrictions of its kind essentially eliminates the  
>> possibility of
>> SNOMED-CT hosted as 'open' linked data unless the hosting is done  
>> by the
>> International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation
>> (IHTSDO).
>>
>> I wonder, how much of an impediment this is to the-reuse of current
>> terminology standards such as these in SW representational formats?
>>
>> -- Chimezie
>>
>>
>>
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>

Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2008 02:00:26 UTC