中医药领域本体研究现状与思考

Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM)Domain Ontology:Current Status and Rethinking for the Future Development

在过去的二十年里,随着中医(traditional Chinese medicine,TCM)信息化的发展,本体的重要性越来越受到重视。然而,TCM本体的发展面临着诸多挑战。首先,由于TCM与当代生物医学认识论不同,现有的顶层本体很难应用于TCM领域知识的表示。同时,TCM领域现有的术语标准、术语集和本体互操作性不佳,数据孤岛现象广泛存在。其次,各类TCM本体的形式化表示仍需要进一步完善。因此,我们提出,应在对现有顶层本体开展深入的理论研究,并对TCM中的重要概念进行重新梳理后提出统一的TCM基础语义框架。在这样的框架下,协同构建TCM子领域本体,并以通用格式进行形式化表示。此外,应通过建立本体研究社区来鼓励广泛的合作,以促进本体同行评审和重利用。

The past twenty years have seen the increasingly important role of ontology in traditional Chinese medicine(TCM).However,the development of TCM ontology faces many challenges.Since the epistemologies dramatically differ between TCM and contemporary biomedicine,it is hard to apply the existing top-level ontology mechanically.“Data silos”are widely present in the currently available terminology standards,term sets,and ontologies.The formal representation of ontology needs to be further improved in TCM.Therefore,we propose a unified basic semantic framework of TCM based on in-depth theoretical research on the existing top・level ontology and a re-study of important concepts in TCM.Under such a framework,ontologies in TCM subdomains should be built collaboratively and be represented formally in a common format.Besides,extensive cooperation should be encouraged by establishing ontology research communities to promote ontology peer review and reuse.