- From: Olivier Bodenreider <olivier@nlm.nih.gov>
- Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 13:00:13 -0400
- To: Benjamin Good <goodb@interchange.ubc.ca>
- CC: 'public-semweb-lifesci' <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
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. -- Olivier
Received on Monday, 5 June 2006 17:00:21 UTC