Gut microbiota produce and modulate the production of neurotransmitters which have been implicated in mental disorders. Neurotransmitters may act as ‘matchmaker’ between gut microbiota imbalance and mental disorders. Most of the relevant research effort goes into the relationship between gut microbiota and neurotransmitters and the other between neurotransmitters and mental disorders, while few studies collect and analyze the dispersed research results in systematic ways. We therefore gather the dispersed results that in the existing studies into a structured knowledge base for identifying and predicting the potential relationships between gut microbiota and mental disorders. In this study, we propose to construct a gut microbiota knowledge graph for mental disorder, which named as MiKG4MD. It is extendable by linking to future ontologies by just adding new relationships between existing information and new entities. This extendibility is emphasized for the integration with existing popular ontologies/terminologies, e.g. UMLS, MeSH, and KEGG. We demonstrate the performance of MiKG4MD with three SPARQL query test cases. Results show that the MiKG4MD knowledge graph is an effective method to predict the relationships between gut microbiota and mental disorders.
Semantic web (SW) technology has been widely applied to many domains such as medicine, health care, finance, geology. At present, researchers mainly rely on their experience and preferences to develop and evaluate the work of SW technology. Although the general architecture (e.g., Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web Layer Cake) of SW technology was proposed many years ago and has been well-known, it still lacks a concrete guideline for standardizing the development of SW technology. In this paper, we propose an SW technology index to standardize the development for ensuring that the work of SW technology is designed well and to quantitatively evaluate the quality of the work in SW technology. This index consists of 10 criteria that quantify the quality as a score of $$0{-}10$$
0
-
10
. We address each criterion in detail for a clear explanation from three aspects: (1) what is the criterion? (2) why do we consider this criterion and (3) how do the current studies meet this criterion? Finally, we present the validation of this index by providing some examples of how to apply the index to the validation cases. We conclude that the index is a useful standard to guide and evaluate the work in SW technology.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.