MeSH® RDF

This directory contains two modules for MeSH in RDF:

• A set of XSLT files that transform MeSH XML into RDF
• A Java-based user interface, based on EBI's Lodestar.

The GitHub repository also contains the content for the technical documentation pages, deployed as a set of GitHub pages, at http://hhs.github.io/meshrdf.

Please see that technical documentation for details about the data model, and how this new RDF version of MeSH relates to the XML from which it derives.

The rest of this README describes:

• How to set up a development environment and perform the transformations yourself, if you are interested in doing that.
• How to build the Java UI as a front-end for OpenLink Virtuoso, if you are interested in doing that.

All the instructions assume that you're running on a Unix-like operating system, in a bash shell. If you have a Windows machine, we recommend that you install cygwin or Git for Windows Please let us know (by opening a GitHub issue) if you have problems.

RDF Download

The RDF files in N-Triples format can be downloaded from our FTP Server.

You will find there two main files:

• mesh.nt - N-Triples files for the current MeSH year
• mesh.nt.gz - Gzip compresesd files

There are also SHA-1 checksums for thes files, and sub-directories contain year-specific N-Triples files.

Quick start

Follow these steps convert MeSH XML to RDF yourself.

First, clone this repository.

git clone https://github.com/HHS/meshrdf.git
cd meshrdf

Next, you can either explore this repository using the included sample XML files (in the samples directory, which are relatively small), or, if you need complete and up-to-date data, you can download the latest MeSH XML files from the NLM server. The latter option is described first.

Getting the MeSH XML files

Since the complete MeSH data files are quite large, we assume that they'll be kept location on the filesystem that is separate from this GitHub repository. Set the environment variable $MESHRDF_HOME to point to that location. For example,

export MESHRDF_HOME=/var/data/mesh-rdf

You can run the script bin/fetch-mesh-xml.sh, which downloads all the XML and corresponding DTD files from the NLM FTP server.

bin/fetch-mesh-xml.sh

This saves the XML files to the data subdirectory of $MESHRDF_HOME.

By default, it downloads the following:

• desc2024.xml
• qual2024.xml
• supp2024.xml

If you want to download a different year's data, use the -y argument when executing the script. For example:

bin/fetch-mesh-xml.sh -y 2019

When downloading a year less than or equal to 2015, bin/fetch-mesh-xml.sh will also download the DTDs. For example:

• desc2015.xml and desc2015.dtd
• qual2015.xml and qual2015.dtd
• supp2015.xml and supp2015.dtd

Getting Saxon

There are a number of different ways to run the XSLT stylesheets to convert the XML data into RDF. The XSLTs are written in XSLT 2.0, though, so the xsltproc command, which comes on most Unix systems, will not work.

One easy way is to download and extract the open-source Saxon Home Edition, which is written in Java, and will work on most platforms. You can download it from here. Navigate to the latest version, and follow the instructions (which appear after the list of files). As a shortcut, you can download version 9.5 (which is known to work with these XSLTs) from the command line directly:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/saxon/files/Saxon-HE/9.5/SaxonHE9-5-1-5J.zip

Unzip that into the saxon9he subdirectory. For example:

unzip -d saxon9he SaxonHE9-5-1-5J.zip

Set an environment variable SAXON_JAR to point to the executable Jar file:

export SAXON_JAR=*repository-dir*/saxon9he/saxon9he.jar

Where repository-dir is the base directory of this repository. If your version of Saxon is in a different location, then, of course, set this environment variable appropriately.

Converting the complete MeSH data set

The conversion script is bin/mesh-xml2rdf.sh. This shell script will run the XSLTs to convert each of the three main MeSH XML files into RDF N-Triples format, and put the results into the $MESHRDF_HOME/out directory.

By default, it looks for 2024 data files, and will produce mesh.nt, which is the RDF in N-triples format, and mesh.nt.gz, a gzipped version. Also by default, these data files will have RDF URIs that do not include the year. For example, the descriptor for Ofloxacin would have the URI http://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/D015242.

As with the fetch script, described above, you can use the -y argument to specify that it convert a different set of data files. For example:

bin/mesh-xml2rdf.sh -y 2019

This uses the 2019 data files to produce the "current" RDF output files out/mesh.nt and out/mesh.nt.gz.

To produce RDF data that has URIs with the year, you should also use the -u argument. For example, the following generates RDF URIs that include the year:

bin/mesh-xml2rdf.sh -y 2019 -u

In this case, the output data files will be written to out/2019/mesh2019.nt and out/2019/mesh2019.nt.gz.

URI preservation and versioning

The vocabulary, meta/vocabulary.owl, includes data proprerties used to indicate which entities are still present in MeSH XmL, and which are no longer present. However, these scripts produce N-triples files that are inputs to the data processing that preserves URIs and adds these properties.

The N-triples files on the FTP server are versioned with this algorithm, and so will not quite match files generated by this conversion.

There are also SHA-1 checksums on the FTP server.

Generating and converting the sample files

In the samples subdirectory are a number of sample files that can be used for testing. The XML files here are generated from the full MeSH XML files, but are included in the repository so that anyone can get up and running, and try things out, very easily.

The sample-list.txt file has the list of items from each of the three main XML files that provide a fairly good coverage of the variation of data found within MeSH.

These three sample files, corresponding to that list and the three main XML files, are included in the repository:

• desc-samples.xml
• qual-samples.xml
• supp-samples.xml

The Perl script make-samples.pl can be used to regenerate these sample files from the master XML files, extracting just those items that are listed in the sample-list.txt file, if any of those changes. So, keep in mind that these samples in the repository are used for testing/demo purposes, and are not necessarily up-to-date with the latest MeSH release.

Finally, the script convert-samples.sh can be used to convert the sample XML files into RDF, the final output being samples.nt.

Note that the generated RDF will be missing a lot of meshv:parentTreeNumber relationships, because those are generated from the tree node identifiers to link between various records. Since the sample files contain only a subset of the records, most of these cannot be generated.

Project directory structure

These are the subdirectories of this project -- either part of the repository, or created:

• bin - Scripts for fetching the XML and running the conversions
• meta - Schema for the RDF, and other documentation
• rnc - Relax NG Compact version of the MeSH XML file schema (experimental, not normative)
• samples - XML data files and scripts for testing and demo purposes, which each contain a small subset of the items from the real XML data files, as described above.
• xslt - The main XSLT processor files that convert the XML into RDF.
• data - an NTriples files containing rdfs:label for Central Nervous System diseases in 14 languages. This is included as an example.
• webui - Java overlay for lodestar (https://github.com/EBISPOT/lodestar)

These are the subdirectories of the $MESHRDF_HOME directory, which typically (but not necessarily) is set to some separate location:

• data - Source MeSH XML files. These files are moderately large, and change often, so they are not part of the repository, but should be downloaded separately, as described above.
• out - Product RDF files, in n-triples format. The conversion scripts write these product files here. Copies of the data files may also appear here.

Virtuoso setup

Here are some notes for downloading and building OpenLink's Virtuoso software, which can be used for querying the resulting RDF. These notes are here for reference only, in case they are helpful. If these don't work for you, please direct questions to the OpenLink group.

Dependencies: gcc, gmake, autoconf, automake, libtool, flex, bison, gperf, gawk, m4, make, openssl-devel, readline-devel, wget.

Decide on a directory where you will install virtuoso, and set the $VIRTUOSO_HOME environment variable to point to that.

Checkout source from github:

git clone https://github.com/openlink/virtuoso-opensource.git
cd virtuoso-opensource
git checkout develop/7   # should say already on develop/7

Build:

./autogen.sh
CFLAGS="-O2 -m64"
export CFLAGS
./configure --prefix=$VIRTUOSO_HOME --with-readline
make
make install

Start up of server:

cd $VIRTUOSO_HOME/virtuoso/var/lib/virtuoso/db
$VIRTUOSO_HOME/bin/virtuoso-t

Shutdown of server (see the Virtuoso documentation):

kill -s SIGTERM `cut -d= -f2 $VIRTUOSO_HOME/virtuoso/var/lib/virtuoso/db/virtuoso.lck`

Building the webui with Maven

The webui depends on a parent pom.xml that contains local properties. This is to avoid placing passwords in the clear into git. If you do a build with virtuoso running on the localhost, without changing the default dba password, and you have loaded the MeSH RDF data, the build should work.

However, in a real world scenario, you should edit your local Maven configuration file, $HOME/.m2/settings.xml, to add a profile that overrides some properties.

• To run unit tests, you may need to override the following properties:
  • virtuosoServerName
  • virtuosoUserName
  • virtuosoPassword
• To deploy artifacts to a Maven repository, you may need to override the following properties:
  • release.repo.url
  • snapshot.repo.url
  • Make sure the servers mentioned in webui/pom.xml appear in your local settings.xml

Here's an example command-line with profile meshrdf:

mvn -Pmeshrdf clean package

To run such a build on Tomcat, you will need to provide a file src/main/filtered/META-INF/context.xml. Git is setup to ignore such a file so that git does not include servernames, usernames, and passwords and so that the build artifact on CI/CD is likewise free of them.

Technical documentation on GitHub pages

The gh-pages branch of this repository is used to generate the technical documentation viewable from http://hhs.github.io/meshrdf. Please see the README file in that branch for more information.