Exploration of TCM Masters Knowledge Mining

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a rich knowledge about human health and disease by its special way evolved along a very long history. As modern medicine is achieving much progress, arguments and disputes toward TCM never end. To avoid losing precious knowledge of living TCM masters, endeavors have been engaged to systematic collection of those knowledge of TCM masters, such as their growth experiences, effective practical cases toward diseases and typical therapeutic principles and methods. Knowledge mining methods have been expected to explore some useful or hidden patterns to unveil some mysteries of the TCM system. In the paper, some computerized methods are applied toward those collected materials about some living TCM masters in China mainland to show a different way of exposing essential ideas of those TCM masters by correspondence visualization which aims to help people understand TCM holistic views toward disease and body, and facilitate tacit knowledge transfer and sense-making of the essence of TCM. The work is one kind of qualitative meta-synthesis of TCM masters’ knowledge. This research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 70571078 and 70221001 and a National Key Technologies R&D Program for TCM Research in China, and originally presented at the 7th International Workshop on Meta-synthesis and Complex Systems affiliated to the 7th International Conference on Computational Science, Beijing, May 28–30, 2007.