Semantic Web for Knowledge Integration between Traditional Chinese Medicine and Biomedicine

The World Wide Web connects a wide variety of communities in medical domain, and provides a platform for knowledge exchange and integration between Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and biomedicine. However, the cultural gaps between TCM and Western Medicine hinder cross-cultural communication. We utilize Semantic Web technologies to build a knowledge base that integrates distributed and heterogeneous knowledge elements from both biomedicine and TCM, and provides various information retrieval and knowledge discovery services. We explain how this integrated knowledge base helps to bridge the linguistic, semantic, and ontological gaps between different communities, and fosters cross-cultural scientific collaboration.