Construction and Application of the Multidimensional Table for Knowledge Discovery in Ancient Chinese Books on Materia Medica

Rui Jin, Qian Lin, Jun Zhou, Boyu Sun, Bing Zhang

School of Chinese Materia Medica, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China.
School of Chinese Materia Medica, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China Department of Pharmacy, Beijing Shijitan Hospital, Beijing, China.
School of Mathematical Science, Peking University, Beijing, China.

DOI: 10.4236/eng.2013.510B001                

Abstract

Knowledge discovery, as an increasingly adopted information technology in biomedical science, has shown great promise in the field of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). In this paper, we provided a kind of multidimensional table which was well suited for organizing and analyzing the data in ancient Chinese books on Materia Medica. Moreover, we demonstrated its capability of facilitating further mining works in TCM through two illustrative studies of discovering meaningful patterns in the three-dimensional table of Shennong’s Classic of Materia Medica. This work might provide an appropriate data model for the development of knowledge discovery in TCM.

Keywords

Multidimensional Table; TCM; Herbal Medicine; Data Mining; Knowledge Discovery

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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