Re: BioRDF Announcement

As the NLM guy on this forum, I probably need to clarify the 
intellectual property restriction issues with the UMLS.

The Semantic Network is entirely owned by NLM and free of IP 
restrictions. Conversion to OWL has been studied in the past by... Vipul 
(yes, "our" Vipul).

Representing the UMLS® Semantic Network using OWL: (Or what's in a 
Semantic Web link?)
KASHYAP Vipul and BORGIDA Alex
Proceedings of ISWC 2003, Lecture notes in computer science vol. 2870, 
pp. 1-16

Kashyap V.
The UMLS Semantic Network and the Semantic Web.
AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2003:351-5.
PMID: 14728193

For various reasons, the OWLization of the Semantic Network is not 
completely trivial.


Regarding the UMLS Metathesaurus, there are various kinds of 
restrictions listed in the license agreement 
(http://wwwcf.nlm.nih.gov/umlslicense/snomed/license.cfm), which is why 
most UMLS-based services (e.g., Knowledge Source Server GUI and API, 
MetaMap, etc.) require authentication. There have been discussions for a 
while here at NLM about providing a subset of the UMLS that could be 
freely distributed. Currently, such source vocabularies (with "source 
restriction level = 0") can be easily extracted from the Metathesaurus 
using MetamorphoSys. As you mention, SNOMED CT, while freely available 
in the member countries of the IHTSDO, cannot be made publicly available.
I have plans to work on an RDF version of MeSH that could be made 
publicly available. EricN has encouraged me to do it for quite some time 
now, but I haven't still done it yet.

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.

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 Monday, 21 July 2008 15:01:27 UTC