Information retrieval and knowledge discovery on the semantic web of traditional chinese medicine.

We conduct the first systematical adoption of the Semantic Web solution in the integration, management, and utilization of TCM information and knowledge resources. As the results, the largest TCM Semantic Web ontology is engineered as the uniform knowledge representation mechanism; the ontology-based query and search engine is deployed, mapping legacy and heterogeneous relational databases to the Semantic Web layer for query and search across database boundaries; the first global herb-drug interaction network is mapped through semantic integration, and the semantic graph mining methodology is implemented for discovering and interpreting interesting patterns from this network. The platform and underlying methodology are proved effective in TCM-related drug usage, discovery, and safety analysis.