title: Towards Semantic e-Science for Traditional Chinese Medicine.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Recent advances in Web and information technologies with the increasing decentralization of organizational structures have resulted in massive amounts of information resources and domain-specific services in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The massive volume and diversity of information and services available have made it difficult to achieve seamless and interoperable e-Science for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. Therefore, information integration and service coordination are two major challenges in e-Science for TCM. We still lack sophisticated approaches to integrate scientific data and services for TCM e-Science.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We present a comprehensive approach to build dynamic and extendable e-Science applications for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM based on semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The semantic e-Science infrastructure for TCM supports large-scale database integration and service coordination in a virtual organization. We use domain ontologies to integrate TCM database resources and services in a semantic cyberspace and deliver a semantically superior experience including browsing, searching, querying and knowledge discovering to users. We have developed a collection of semantic-based toolkits to facilitate TCM scientists and researchers in information sharing and collaborative research.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Semantic and knowledge-based techniques are suitable to knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. It's possible to build on-demand e-Science system for TCM based on existing semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The presented approach in the paper integrates heterogeneous distributed TCM databases and services, and provides scientists with semantically superior experience to support collaborative research in TCM discipline.
authors.affiliation: College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, PR China. huajunsir@zju.edu.cn
authors.forename: Huajun
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Yuxin
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Mao
authors.forename: Xiaoqing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.forename: Meng
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cui
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.forename: Shuiguang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Deng
authors.forename: Aining
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Yin
authors.forename: Chunying
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Jinming
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.forename: Xiaohong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.forename: Zhaohui
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wu
mesh_terms: D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004282:Documentation / Q000379:methods; D033181:Information Dissemination / Q000379:methods*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D038622:Internationality; D020407:Internet; D008516:Medicine, Chinese Traditional / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012586:Science / Q000379:methods*; D012660:Semantics; D018511:Systems Integration; D014584:User-Computer Interface