Research Of The Application Of Topic Maps Technology On Knowledge Organization Of "Shanghanlun"

Chinese medicine is the precious wealth of the Chinese nation,which has made tremendous contributions to the prosperity of the Chinese nation.The Chinese medicine literature contains abundant of Chinese medicine information,while the Chinese medicine information is characterized by high knowledge intensity and complicated relationship among knowledge,which is rich with tacit knowledge and has great potential for knowledge discovery.Knowledge organization can be regarded as the process or actions to reveal the knowledge units(including explicit knowledge factor and tacit knowledge factor),and to explore the knowledge connection,and it can provide the most effective knowledge or information for users quickly.With the development of Internet technology,the research on the sharing and service of TCM knowledge is becoming more and more important,the promotion of TCM knowledge organization and sharing service is one of the important aspects of the development of TCM information.The knowledge of Chinese medicine is composed of the explicit knowledge which is easier to be expressed in words and the tacit knowledge which is difficult to be expressed.The purpose of knowledge organization of Chinese medicine is mainly to promote the dissemination and sharing of the knowledge of Chinese medicine.In order to improve the sharing and discovery of Chinese medicine knowledge,we adopted the methods of thesaurus,semantic network and ontology to organize the knowledge organization of Chinese medicine and made some achievements.As an international standard(ISO 13250),topic maps is a kind of knowledge organization technology which is used to describe the knowledge structure and connect with relevant knowledge resources.The technology can be used to make a structured expression and organization of the domain knowledge by the three basic elements which are the topics,the associations,and the occurrences.The definition of the topics and the associations has a greater degree of freedom.As an international standard technology of knowledge organization,the topic maps technology is a metadata format for describing knowledge,also can be used to describe the complexity of knowledge,so it is easy to form a complete knowledge system and realize the effective integration of knowledge resources.At the same time,the topic maps is not limited to a specific type of knowledge,and it not only can describe the data structure and the association of knowledge,but also can quickly find a knowledge concept and locate its corresponding resources.Therefore,this study will take "Shang Han Lun" as an example to explore the specific application of topic maps technology in the field of traditional Chinese medicine.1 Research purpose and significanceThis research uses the topic maps technology to organize the original knowledge of "Shang Han Lun" with the clinical medical records to build the topic maps model of "Shang Han Lun",which lays the foundation for constructing the knowledge base of "Shang Han Lun",and explores the specific application of topic maps technology in the field of traditional Chinese medicine,and provides new methods for the Chinese medicine knowledge organization,expression and found,and to promote the dissemination and sharing of Chinese medicine knowledge.2 Research contents and methodsIn this study,we research the basic topics and topic types,the associations and association types,and the occurrences of "Shang Han Lun" through the analysis of the contents,and build the knowledge concept model of "Shang Han Lun" based on the topic maps,and realize the construction and application of topic maps.The main research contents include the following aspects:(1)The topic analysis and extraction of "Shang Han Lun"This study defines the topics of "Shang Han Lun" basing on the original content with the linguistic method,and by the grammatical and semantic analysis of syntax,elements and language environment of the provisions,and provides data support for the definition of topic types as well as the associations.Because of the phenomenon of the homophones and polysemy commonly exists in the ancient Chinese,therefore,it is mainly based on the following rules in the extraction of the topic words:?Do not extract the adjectives,adverbs,modal words in the provisions without practical significance.?Extract the topic words basing on the original text,should not modify the words from the text.?Extract the words or phrases as small as possible which can represent the knowledge unit to be a topic.(2)Definition of topic typeThe main purpose of this study is to construct the topic maps model of "Shang Han Lun",and the topic type is composed of topics with the same properties,topic is one of the key elements of topic maps."Shang Han Lun" has established the basic framework of "treatment according to syndrome differentiation" and the basic norms of clinical theory and prescription of Chinese medicine,including the syndromes,treatment,prescription,Chinese medicine and so on.So this paper defines the topic types of "Shang Han Lun" basing on the analysis of the content of "Shang Han Lun"and the information of the prescription in the clinical practice.And we collect the topics with the same properties as the instances under one topic type.The topics and topic types are necessary to build the topic maps model of "Shang Han Lun".(3)Definition of association typeThe association is one of the key elements of topic maps,and the topics can be linked to form a structured knowledge network by the association,which can be used to realize semantic matching between topics,also is the foundation for realizing the semantic retrieval.Through the analysis of the internal knowledge content of "Shang Han Lun" and the topic types of the related medical records,this study analyzed semantic relationships among the defined topic types,and established the association among the topic types.(4)Definition of the content of occurrenceIn the topic maps,all the information related to the topics can be referred to as the occurrence.Due to the different topic types have different attributes,resource domain and resource provenance,we can establish internal occurrence and external occurrence of topic types according to the defined topic types and the content of"Shang Han Lun",so as to make the topic maps model of "Shang Han Lun" become more substantial and more useful.(5)The construction and the application of topic maps model of "Shang Han Lun"Ontopia as a topic maps development tool is used to build the topic maps of"Shang Han Lun",and it is used to realize the functions of graphical visualizations and information retrieval.3.ResultsAccording to the basic content of "Shang Han Lun" and the key points of the"treatment according to syndrome differentiation" of Chinese medicine,through the interviews of small range,we define 16 topic types of topic maps model of "Shang Han Lun",which includes Chinese drugs,prescriptions,medical records,western medicine disease,syndromes,original content,prescriptions and syndromes,etiology and pathogenesis as well as treatment,TCM disease,persons,etc.At the same time,according to the content of "Shang Han Lun" to fulfill the instances of various topic types.In order to form an effective knowledge network,the analysis and definition of the association are essential,in this study,14 types of association are defined,such as the treatment,include,disable,lead to,original text link,and see also.At the same time,in order to fully describe all the resources of topics,the occurrence analysis of the defined topic types also is carried out,and the occurrence is divided into the internal occurrence with resources attribute and the external occurrence with the URI links.Ontopia Knowledge Suite(OKS)is used to complete the construction of the topic maps of "Shang Han Lun" and its function of graphical visualizations and the applications of information retrieval.4 ConclusionsThis study takes "Shang Han Lun" as an research example,16 kinds of topic types,associations and occurrences are defined in the 397 original content,and 14 kinds of association types are defined.Including the direct use of TCMLS in the "treat,manifestation of,bring about,contains,use ",five kinds of semantic relationship and the new definition of "disabled,equivalent,concocted,fried method,drug composition,source provisions,see".Accomplish the topic maps model of "Shang Han Lun" with the topic maps development tool of Ontopia,and realizes the functions of graphical visualizations and retrieval of the information of TCM prescription,TCM Drug,treatment,symptoms,medical records and other related knowledge.This demonstrates that topic maps technology is very powerful on the knowledge organization and it verifies the feasibility and advantage in the knowledge organization of "Shang Han Lun".As the "Shang Han Lun" is one of the ancient books,its language and writing have the general characteristics of classical,that is,words and vocabulary to express the corresponding characteristics of the times,topics can be flexibly defined,and thus using topic maps technology could retain the original text of the concept,and show the original knowledge content.In this study,the topic maps technology is applied to the knowledge organization of TCM,it has achieved the construction of the topic maps model of TCM related fields,which can be regarded as a new exploration and attempt of the method of knowledge organization on Traditional Chinese Medicine.This study not only has organized the knowledge of Traditional Chinese Medicine reasonably and effectively,but also shows intuitively about the knowledge of traditional Chinese Medicine,as well as realizes the retrieval function.All this indicates the important practical application value of topic maps in TCM.