Department of Traditional Medicine, School of Persian Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
Department of Biology, Temple University, PA, USA.
J Biomed Semantics. 2021 Apr 16;12(1):9. doi: 10.1186/s13326-021-00237-1.
Iranian traditional medicine, also known as Persian Medicine, is a holistic school of medicine with a long prolific history. It describes numerous concepts and the relationships between them. However, no unified language system has been proposed for the concepts of this medicine up to the present time. Considering the extensive terminology in the numerous textbooks written by the scholars over centuries, comprehending the totality of concepts is obviously a very challenging task. To resolve this issue, overcome the obstacles, and code the concepts in a reusable manner, constructing an ontology of the concepts of Iranian traditional medicine seems a necessity.
Makhzan al-Advieh, an encyclopedia of materia medica compiled by Mohammad Hossein Aghili Khorasani, was selected as the resource to create an ontology of the concepts used to describe medicinal substances. The steps followed to accomplish this task included (1) compiling the list of classes via examination of textbooks, and text mining the resource followed by manual review to ensure comprehensiveness of extracted terms; (2) arranging the classes in a taxonomy; (3) determining object and data properties; (4) specifying annotation properties including ID, labels (English and Persian), alternative terms, and definitions (English and Persian); (5) ontology evaluation. The ontology was created using Protégé with adherence to the principles of ontology development provided by the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) foundry.
The ontology was finalized with inclusion of 3521 classes, 15 properties, and 20,903 axioms in the Iranian traditional medicine General Ontology (IrGO) database, freely available at http://ir-go.net/ . An indented list and an interactive graph view using WebVOWL were used to visualize the ontology. All classes were linked to their instances in UNaProd database to create a knowledge base of ITM materia medica.
We constructed an ontology-based knowledge base of ITM concepts in the domain of materia medica to help offer a shared and common understanding of this concept, enable reuse of the knowledge, and make the assumptions explicit. This ontology will aid Persian medicine practitioners in clinical decision-making to select drugs. Extending IrGO will bridge the gap between traditional and conventional schools of medicine, helping guide future research in the process of drug discovery.
伊朗传统医学，也被称为波斯医学，是一种有着悠久历史的整体医学体系。它描述了许多概念及其相互关系。然而，到目前为止，还没有为这种医学的概念提出统一的语言系统。考虑到几个世纪以来学者们编写的众多教科书所涉及的广泛术语，理解概念的全貌显然是一项极具挑战性的任务。为了解决这个问题，克服障碍，并以可重用的方式对概念进行编码，构建伊朗传统医学概念的本体似乎是必要的。
Makhzan al-Advieh 是由 Mohammad Hossein Aghili Khorasani 编纂的药物学百科全书，被选为创建描述药物物质的概念本体的资源。完成此任务的步骤包括：(1) 通过检查教科书来编制类列表，并对资源进行文本挖掘，然后进行手动审查以确保提取术语的全面性；(2) 对类进行分类；(3) 确定对象和数据属性；(4) 指定注释属性，包括 ID、标签（英语和波斯语）、替代术语和定义（英语和波斯语）；(5) 本体评估。该本体使用 Protege 创建，遵循开放生物和生物医学本体（OBO）铸造厂提供的本体开发原则。
本体最终包括 3521 个类、15 个属性和 20903 个公理，这些都被收录在伊朗传统医学通用本体（IrGO）数据库中，可在 http://ir-go.net/ 免费获取。使用缩进列表和使用 WebVOWL 的交互图视图来可视化本体。所有类都与 UNaProd 数据库中的实例相关联，以创建 ITM 药物学的知识库。
我们构建了一个基于本体的 ITM 药物学概念知识库，以帮助人们对这些概念形成共同的理解，实现知识的重用，并明确假设。这个本体将有助于波斯医学从业者在临床决策中选择药物。扩展 IrGO 将弥合传统医学和常规医学之间的差距，帮助指导药物发现过程中的未来研究。
