Publishing Chinese medicine knowledge as Linked Data on the Web

BACKGROUND Chinese medicine (CM) draws growing attention from Western healthcare practitioners and patients. However, the integration of CM knowledge and Western medicine (WM) has been hindered by a barrier of languages and cultures as well as a lack of scientific evidence for CM's efficacy and safety. In addition, most of CM knowledge published with relational database technology makes the integration of databases even more challenging. METHODS Linked Data approach was used in publishing CM knowledge. This approach was applied to publishing a CM linked dataset, namely RDF-TCM http://www.open-biomed.org.uk/rdf-tcm/ based on TCMGeneDIT, which provided association information about CM in English. RESULTS The Linked Data approach made CM knowledge accessible through standards-compliant interfaces to facilitate the bridging of CM and WM. The open and programmatically-accessible RDF-TCM facilitated the creation of new data mash-up and novel federated query applications. CONCLUSION Publishing CM knowledge in Linked Data provides a point of departure for integration of CM databases.