On the design of a self-medication web application built on linked open data

Open Self-Medication1  is a Web application that better informs people when treating undiagnosed medical ailments with unprescribed, over the counter drugs, i.e., self-medicating. The application achieves this goal by providing a set of functionalities that ensure safety and efficiency of this practice. The system’s most critical operations are processed using a self-medication knowledge base, expressed in OWL, which has been inductively built on medical information obtained from a similar French project. A main characteristic of this application is that almost all the data processed by the system and presented to the end-user comes from a subset of the LOD data sets, namely DrugBank, DailyMed, Sider and DBPedia. This paper motivates the design of such an application, provides the design choices, describes some implementation details and presents lessons learned and future work.