IrGO

IrGO organizes and codifies medicinal substances and related concepts from Iranian traditional (Persian) medicine into a structured ontology for knowledge representation and integration with biomedical resources.

Key Features:

• Ontology construction: Term extraction from the encyclopedia Makhzan al-Advieh by Mohammad Hossein Aghili Khorasani using text mining followed by manual review to compile a taxonomy of concepts.
• Class and property specification: The ontology contains 3,521 classes and 15 properties with annotation properties including IDs, English and Persian labels, alternative terms, and definitions.
• Axioms and relationships: The ontology encodes 20,903 axioms that define relationships between concepts for knowledge representation and retrieval.
• Visualization: Hierarchical structure is visualized as an indented list and using WebVOWL for graphical representation.
• Integration with knowledge base: All classes are linked to instances in the UNaProd database to form a connected knowledge base of Iranian traditional medicine materia medica.

Scientific Applications:

• Facilitating clinical decision-making: Provides a shared, codified representation of Persian Medicine concepts to support informed selection of medicinal substances.
• Bridging traditional and conventional medicine: Enables mapping and interdisciplinary research between Iranian traditional medicine concepts and conventional biomedical frameworks.
• Guiding drug discovery research: Supplies a structured framework of medicinal substances and annotations to inform research into bioactive materials and drug leads.

Methodology:

Development adheres to the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry principles and the ontology was created using Protégé.