Enhancing Drug-Related Data Exchange: Advanced Technical Support for Interoperability.

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Informatics
• Pharmacology
• Data Science

Background:

• The Canadian Drug Ontology (OCRx) is a valuable resource for drug information.
• Facilitating access and usability of complex ontologies like OCRx is crucial for research.
• Existing methods for querying and accessing OCRx may present barriers to widespread adoption.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and describe a suite of technical services for the Canadian Drug Ontology (OCRx).
• To enhance the accessibility and interoperability of OCRx data for researchers.
• To promote the application of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles to OCRx.

Main Methods:

• Development of a lookup service (PaperRx) for retrieving OCRx drug entities via Description Logic queries (DLqueries).
• Implementation of a SPARQL endpoint for semantic querying of OCRx.
• Provision of an OWL file downloader and a RESTful Application Programming Interface (API) for programmatic access.

Main Results:

• A comprehensive set of technical services has been successfully developed and deployed for OCRx.
• The PaperRx service enables efficient retrieval of drug entities based on their classified structure.
• The integrated services facilitate compliance with FAIR data principles for the OCRx ontology.

Conclusions:

• The developed technical services significantly improve the usability and accessibility of the Canadian Drug Ontology (OCRx).
• These services empower researchers to leverage OCRx data more effectively, adhering to FAIR data standards.
• The enhanced accessibility of OCRx is expected to foster greater integration into drug discovery and pharmacovigilance research.