This document discusses a project called Semantic Medicine that aims to develop an ontology and application for herbal medicine. It will extract data on medicinal plants from existing sources and ontologies, and make it accessible via a REST API and SPARQL endpoint. The application will allow users to search for plant remedies based on medical conditions or search for plant characteristics. It outlines plans to develop an ontology for herbal medicine, REST endpoints for retrieving plant and remedy data, and priorities to focus on modeling and the API before graphical aspects.

1. Semantic Medicine
Alexandra Lacatus, Emanuela Catana
Faculty of Computer Science, Iasi

2. Motivation
 Herbal Medicine is an important alternative to drug-based
medicine
 HM represents many people’s choices
 The web has plenty of relevant information (unstructured
yet)
 The project combines the use of semantic data representation
with useful information (medicinal plants)
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Semantic Medicine, FCS Iasi, 2013

3. Current work
 Medicinal plant collections (HerbMed, MedlinePlus)
 Ontologies for modelling plant vocabularies (The Plant
Ontology)
 Ontologies for indian medicinal plants (MP-Ontology, KIMP
project)
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Semantic Medicine, FCS Iasi, 2013

4. SEDIC Project Milestones
 HM-ontology specification
 Data extraction (websites, DBpedia)
 REST API + SPARQL endpoint to access the data
 Android client application
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Semantic Medicine, FCS Iasi, 2013

5. Main user stories
 Search for a possible cure for an illness
An illness is characterized by an affected body area and some
affection parameters (intensity, type). The user can also
specify a medical condition (contraindications, other
diseases)
 Look up for the characteristics of a specific plant
(search upon a plant name)
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Semantic Medicine, FCS Iasi, 2013

6. System architecture
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Semantic Medicine, FCS Iasi, 2013

7. Proposal – HM-Ontology
 A task-oriented ontology for representing medicinal plants
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Semantic Medicine, FCS Iasi, 2013

8. Proposal – REST API
 GET /plantRemedy
 Gets the information about a single plant remedy
 POST /plantRemedy
 Uses the existing parameters to search for remedies
 GET /plant
 Returns information about a specific plant
 POST /plant
 Uses the parameters to search for plants with the specified
name/location
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Semantic Medicine, FCS Iasi, 2013

9. Until next time: priorities
 We will focus more on the modelling part and on the REST
API implementation rather than on the esthetical aspects on
this project
 Depending on the timeframe, we could include also extra
features, like the possibility to add an upvote/downvote for a
remedy
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Semantic Medicine, FCS Iasi, 2013