Medical Database Project (M. D.

Project)

Introduction Nowadays there is a large amount of data and information related to medical and health science distributed in the form of both electronic and paperbased media along various web sites. However, it has not yet been organized in a systematic way. Most of data are gathered and categorized as links to medical data in various portal web sites. Even those data are related but there is no explicit link between them. Thus, typical users need to surf through those web portals by themselves or use search engines by inputting a set of keywords to get a list of related web pages. This process is inefficient and requires much effort. To provide an efficient way to access required information, it is worth making research and development on construction of systematically linked biomedical database and knowledge base including databases for medical treatment and drug design. Recently, there have been many research works on constructing biomedical database and knowledge base. Typical works include those presented in W3C Workshop on Semantic Web for Life Sciences and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), an ontology system for medical data. To achieve this research objective, a wide spectrum of techniques is required as follows. A framework of ontology and RDF (Resource Description Framework) will support a basic structure for biomedical knowledge base system and semantic web, and a way to define biomedical terms used in the system. Based on the above-mentioned background, this project aims to construct database and knowledge base in biomedical and pharmaceutical areas from several resources available in the Internet, and then to propose a set of methods to manage and utilize such data and knowledge efficiently. Moreover, this project will propose a design of a standardized information scheme in order to make it possible to retrieve information and even knowledge in depth, as well as support data visualization to users. The project will focus on three kinds of medical information. They are: 1. General medical information in Thailand such as hospital, medical doctor and disease, 2. Herb-related information such as herb type, herb characteristics and herb functions, and 3. Medical information on medical web sites. To this end, this project involves the following three main tasks: 1. To develop sharable knowledge base and basic tools for managing and visualizing information, 2. To develop systems and techniques for building a practical and useful prototype of database and knowledge base and 3. To publish a number of conference and journal papers. Constructions of biomedical database and knowledge base, Ontology, Reasoning, Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Discovery and Data mining, Visualization.