Towards a TCM domain ontology: Standardization, ontology engineering, and applications

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a medical system with a long history, and is still in-practice today. The TCM domain has a plenty of archaic and abstruse terms and a complex conceptual system. In the information age, a lot of work has been done to digitalize TCM knowledge assets for information retrieval, knowledge discovery, and other applications. A domain ontology helps to standardize TCM terminology and can be very useful in TCM informatics. Therefore, we have engineered a domain ontology named Traditional Chinese Medicine Language System (TCMLS), which contains approximately 300,000 terms, 120,000 concepts, and 1,270,000 semantic relations. The semantic network framework of TCMLS was published as the ISO technical specification "ISO/TS 17938:2014" in 2014. TCMLS has been successfully applied in many applications such as knowledge visualization, terminology integration, and text mining.