Building an Ontology and Knowledge Base of the Human Meridian-Collateral System.

Meridian-collateral knowledge is a profound and complex part of the whole traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). It is the basis for many TCM-related computer applications. This work aimed to develop a sharable knowledge base of the human meridian-collateral system for those applications. We began the work by building a frame ontology of the meridian-collateral system (called OMCAP); and then developed a large-scale sharable instance base (called IMCAP), which was, with the aid of the tool OKEE. The OMCAP consists of 89 categories and 38 slots, and the IMCAP contains 1549 instance frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]