Development of Thai herbal medicine knowledge base using ontology technique

Abstract

This study proposes a method for developing a knowledge base of Thai herbal medicine by using ontology techniques and developing its application as a semantic search system. Since knowledge of Thai herbal medicine is often presented in flat knowledge and lacking in taxonomies, clear understanding of the whole picture of illness and treatment with Thai medicinal plants can hardly be attained. To address this problem ontology has been introduced to create the explicit state of Thai herbal medicine knowledge. Ontology techniques help identifies key concepts and relationships among the concepts in the domain knowledge. The resulting application, Thai Herbal Medicine Ontology (THMO), covers concepts derived from Thai herbal medicine as well as folk medicine. THMO consists of 10 major concepts: Formulation, Finished Product Form, Herb Material, Clinical Warning, Taste, Tri-That, Health Problem and Use Method. The validity of THMO was evaluated by eight professional experts— two ontology engineering specialists and six traditional doctors. The experts’ opinions in general strongly agreed with THMO regarding concept identification, relationship identification, correctness and reusability. As a semantic search THMO application was found to improve the efficiency of information query by excluding non-relevant information.