Re: BioRDF Announcement

2008/7/22 Olivier Bodenreider <olivier@nlm.nih.gov>:
>
> 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(R) 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.
>

How is it legal to utilise identifiers based on SNOMED for work done
outside the US? The license agreement seems to restrict these things
as you would never be able to create the non-dereferenceable
identifiers or search them without them being a derivative of what
seems to be a heavily restricted data set.

On the note of MeSH is what Bio2RDF have done to it illegal in any way
when it is intended for universal redistribution? [1]

Cheers,

Peter
[1] http://bio2rdf.org/download/

Received on Monday, 21 July 2008 20:56:48 UTC