Slides for Gossa Lo's presentation on Linking African Traditional Medicine Knowledge (Lo, de Boer, Schlobach) at the SWAT4LS conference. abstract African Traditional Medicine (ATM) is widely used in Africa as the first-line of treatment thanks to its accessibility and affordability. However, the lack of formalization of this knowledge can lead to safety issues and malpractice. This paper investigates a possible contribution of the Semantic Web in realizing the formalization and integration of ATM with data on conventional medicine. As a proof of concept we convert various ATM datasets and link them to conventional medical data. This results in a Linked ATM knowledge graph. We finally give some examples with some interesting SPARQL queries and insightful results.

1. Linking African Traditional Medicine Knowledge
6 December 2017 - SWAT4LS Conference 2017
Gossa Lô, Victor de Boer, Stefan Schlobach

2. Approach
• Contribution Semantic Web technologies
• Integration ATM + CM
• Three datasets
• Validation

3. African Traditional Medicine (ATM)
• Scientifically (often) unvalidated knowledge
• First-line of treatment
• Lack of formalization
• Safety
• Loss of knowledge
http://healthstaff.co.za/31-august-african-traditional-medicine-day/

4. Constraints to knowledge sharing:
• Low levels of literacy
• Many different
languages spoken
• Poor infrastructures:
(no electricity in the
villages, no internet,
only radio/2G mobile)
Slide from Anna Bon and Victor de Boer

5. Keur Massar, Senegal
• Hôpital Traditionnel
• Herbal medicine
• Tradi-practitioners
• Botanical garden
(1,000 products & recipes)
http://seyilaabe-htkm.blogspot.nl/

6. Madagascar
• Dataset 1: Medicinal plants used by communities in Mahaboboka,
Amboronabo, Mikoboka, Southwestern Madagascar (34 villages)
• Dataset 2: Frequent diseases in Ambalabe rural community, Eastern
Madagascar.
- Rich natural heritage
- Poverty -> loss of biodiversity

7. Tabular data
Triples
Knowledge graphs
on the Web
’set2 99’: [u’Emilia humifusa DC. Rakotoarivelo’, u’Asteraceae’, u’Infected
wound’, u’L’, u’Angea’, u’Cataplasm on wound’, u’400’, 0.02, u’ID’, 25L]
Dictionary
Human Disease
Ontology (DOID)
Symptom
Ontology (SYMP)
SNOMEDCT DBpedia

8. Results
• 13,028 triples
• 672 plant types
• 1,799 health conditions
https://github.com/biktorrr/linkedatmdata
Try it yourself:
http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/linkedatm/home

9. Use case 1
1. Difference in Malaria treatment between two regions
Madagascar

10. Query result case 1
1. Difference in Malaria treatment between two regions
Madagascar

11. 2. Difference in use of plant species between Senegal and
Madagascar
Use case 2

12. Query result case 2
Sclerocarya birrea in Senegal
Sclerocarya birrea in Madagascar

13. Conclusion
• Promising first results
• More varied data
• Linking to pharmaceutical ontologies
• Offline & voice-based