- 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>
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
Received on Tuesday, 6 June 2006 13:05:40 UTC