2.2. Constructing the drug repurposing knowledgebase

We used the UMLS as the backbone of the drug repurposing knowledgebase as it was primarily developed to provide an integration system based on terminology similarity in the biomedical domain. Construction of the knowledgebase consisted of two main steps: 1) building a drug-disease semantic network with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and 2) adding the semantic relationships. Fig. 2 illustrates this process.

Creation of the drug repurposing knowledgebase. Drug and disease information were downloaded from multiple sources, mapped to the UMLS, and finally converted to RDF nodes using the Jena framework.