Re: BioRDF [Telcon]: slides for the UMLS presentation

Fwd: from public-semweb-lifesci. I agree with Eric that
for these reasons SKOS would be a good basis for approaching 
UMLS-in-RDF. Parts of UMLS might go directly into ontologies
but other parts (from what I remember) I'd imagine would be
better expressed in SKOS. Has anyone had an attempt at this?

Dan

----- Forwarded message from Eric Miller <em@w3.org> -----

From: Eric Miller <em@w3.org>
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 09:05:45 -0400
To: olivier@nlm.nih.gov
Cc: Benjamin Good <goodb@interchange.ubc.ca>,
	'public-semweb-lifesci' <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
Subject: Re: BioRDF [Telcon]: slides for the UMLS presentation
Message-Id: <1BC7045A-433C-4858-AB9B-8E8739A4AEE7@w3.org>
Resent-From: public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
Resent-Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:05:43 +0000



On Jun 5, 2006, at 1:00 PM, Olivier Bodenreider wrote:

>
>Benjamin Good wrote:
>>Are there any plans to release the UMLS or parts thereof as RDF /  
>>OWL ?
>Not to my knowledge, Ben. And I certainly would be very cautious of  
>any attempt to doing it. The main reason is that many relations  
>used for creating hierarchies in biomedical vocabularies are not  
>true hierarchical relations (isa, part_of), but simply reflect the  
>purpose for which these terminologies were created. For example, it  
>makes sense in MeSH (i.e., for information retrieval) to have  
>"accident prevention" listed as a child of "accidents". It would be  
>wrong to assume that all child_of relations can be represented by  
>subclassof relations. And an accurate representation of MeSH in OWL  
>would be difficult to obtain.

For these very important reasons, I direct your (and others)  
attention to W3C's work on SKOS. Think of SKOS as an RDF vocabulary  
for thesauri.

[[
SKOS is an area of work developing specifications and standards to  
support the use of knowledge organisation systems (KOS) such as  
thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies,  
other types of controlled vocabulary, and perhaps also terminologies  
and glossaries, within the framework of the Semantic Web.
]]
-- http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/

Often times when constructing thesauri, classification schemes,  
taxonomies, etc. you don't necessarily (as Olivier states) want to  
license the inferencing capabilities of OWL. A common way of exposing  
and making explicit these thesauri relationships in terms of the  
Semantic Web is exactly what SKOS is designed for.

I think representing UMLS in terms of SKOS would be a very powerful  
enabler for the HCLSIG community.

--eric

----- End forwarded message -----

Received on Tuesday, 6 June 2006 17:15:25 UTC