Enabling West African Herbal-Based Traditional Medicine Digitizing: The WATRIMed Knowledge Graph.

The purpose of this study is to describe the design and development of the first release of the West African Herbal based Traditional Medicine Knowledge Graph (WATRIMed). It is a resource containing Traditional Medicine (TM) related entities and linked with publicly available knowledge bases in order to facilitate bringing West African TM into the digital world. The core model comprises currently 556 concepts including 143 identified West African medicinal plants and 108 recipes used by tradi-practitioners to treat 110 diseases and symptoms which are commonly encountered in this part of the world.

Design Considerations for a Knowledge Graph: The WATRIMed Use Case.

The World Health Organization estimates that as much as 80% of the population uses Traditional Medicine (TM) in some form, and in particular, herbal-based Traditional Medicine (HTM). However, TM is mostly orally transmitted and suffers from lack of standardizations and lack of computable TM data. Shareable standards could enable computational support of TM data management. In this paper, we outline the design and development of the West African Herbal Traditional Medicine (WATRIMed) Knowledge Graph (KG), which is an effort for bringing West Africa TM to the digital world and help establishing bridges with conventional medicine. WATRIMed entities have been enriched with knowledge from external publicly available knowledge bases and further mapped with the BioTopLite Upper Level Ontology. As of result, the model of the publicly available KG currently comprises 472 Concepts and 75 Properties (57 object properties and 18 data properties). It describes formally 115 medicinal plants, 179 chemical compounds and 67 recipes.