The Preface Of A Pilot Project
Hanfei Bao，BMKI Lab, Toronto, Canada
Mail: hanfeib@gmail.com
One of the big challenges faced by human beings in the development of the Biomedicine is how to better understand, integrate and use those countless and ever growing biomedical data, information and knowledge, especcially in a precise or biomedical engineering way.
We would prefer taking the mass biomedical knowledge resources(BMKRs) as the complete systems, being precisely organized or tightly connected. But unfortunately it is not true. Our BMKRs nowadays are essentially only fragmentary ones in terms of their cognitive and operative features. They are kinds of well classified knowledge storehouses rather than well connected systems. Except those biomedical sciences such as the anatomy or the praxiology etc. which are obtained on basis of ordinary sense-organs like eyes (neither macro- nor micro-instruments), the most of our BMKRs, especially in the molecular biomedicine, are made up of numberless knowledge pieces which are, in most cases, isolated or separated from each other and poorly connected.
Secondly, our BMKRs are usually only partly known. Thus why they are described visuablly as the grey boxes rather than the white boxes in the Systems Theories. These situations are particularly true for the biomedical sciences at the levels of the molecular biology.
Thirdly, BMKRs are dominantly the knowledge or information of phenomenology in its cognitive nature. That means the knowledge or information are usually observable or measurable but hardly understandable. About them, we generally know what have happened, but we don’t know why they happen or how the molecular mechanics make them happen, and therefore they usually lack of the capacities of precisely reasoning and calculation abilities. In other words, if you intend to use these knowledge in your health practices, you had better to retest them to your target again before a real clinical usage. This is, in fact, the way frequently used in the current clinic practices.
That is why we can’t only make our efforts to mine more and more new biomedical information and knowledge and express or accumulate them only in the traditional ways, i.e. in the way of the free text or the natural language(NL).
One of the goals of the Biomedical Informatics(BMI) and Biomedical Ontology Sciences(BMOS) is to help improve the above situations by formatedly organizations and expressions of biomedical knowledge and developments of powerful applications which operate on them.
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(Updates: 1017-01-11,)