Re: BioRDF Announcement

Peter Ansell wrote:
> 2008/7/22 Olivier Bodenreider <olivier@nlm.nih.gov>:
>   
>> [...]

>> 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.
>   
I am not a lawyer, but as I understand it, the license agreement 
prevents anyone (but the IHTSDO) to make SNOMED CT available "to the 
world" in any form. It does not however, as pointed out by John Madden, 
prevent a user from some IHTSDO member country to map a dataset to 
SNOMED CT (i.e., to enrich this dataset with SNOMED CT identifiers) and 
make this dataset available outside IHTSDO member countries. Depending 
on the use case, a SNOMED CT license might or might not be needed for 
fully exploiting the dataset outside IHTSDO member countries.
I agree, however, that it would be good to have the IHTSDO confirm the 
universal legality of SNOMED CT-based URIs. It would be even better if 
the IHTSDO would create, maintain and promote such SNOMED CT-based URIs. 
What this group (HCLS) could contribute is a series of use cases 
justifying the involvement of the IHTSDO.
> 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/
>   
The English version of MeSH used in Bio2RDF is a "level 0 source", which 
means that there are no specific restrictions attached to it (unlike 
SNOMED CT, for example). MeSH is also publicly available outside the 
UMLS, provided users agree with the following terms and conditions of 
use: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/termscon.html, which I assume the 
Bio2RDF did.

Beyond legality, one major issue to me is *authority*. While Bio2RDF did 
an important and generally excellent job in converting various resources 
to RDF, it is unclear to me 1) how long such an effort is sustainable 
and 2) how reflective it is of the semantics of the original resource.
Quick example about 2): Entry terms in MeSH are generally not equivalent 
to synonyms, but are labeled as such after conversion to RDF in Bio2RDF.
My point here is that, as much as possible, the originator of a resource 
should take responsibility for its conversion to and sustained 
availability in RDF. Again, this is NOT a criticism of Bio2RDF, but 
rather my view of the information sources.

-- Olivier

Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2008 15:10:05 UTC