title: Building a drug ontology based on RxNorm and other sources.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  We built the Drug Ontology (DrOn) because we required correct and consistent drug information in a format for use in semantic web applications, and no existing resource met this requirement or could be altered to meet it. One of the obstacles we faced when creating DrOn was the difficulty in reusing drug information from existing sources. The primary external source we have used at this stage in DrOn's development is RxNorm, a standard drug terminology curated by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). To build DrOn, we (1) mined data from historical releases of RxNorm and (2) mapped many RxNorm entities to Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) classes, pulling relevant information from ChEBI while doing so.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We built DrOn in a modular fashion to facilitate simpler extension and development of the ontology and to allow reasoning and construction to scale. Classes derived from each source are serialized in separate modules. For example, the classes in DrOn that are programmatically derived from RxNorm are stored in a separate module and subsumed by classes in a manually-curated, realist, upper-level module of DrOn with terms such as 'clinical drug role', 'tablet', 'capsule', etc.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  DrOn is a modular, extensible ontology of drug products, their ingredients, and their biological activity that avoids many of the fundamental flaws found in other, similar artifacts and meets the requirements of our comparative-effectiveness research use-case.
authors.affiliation: Division of Biomedical Informatics, University of Akransas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR, USA. jhanna@uams.edu.
authors.forename: Josh
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hanna
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Joseph
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brochhausen
authors.forename: William R
authors.initials: WR
authors.lastname: Hogan