The project is concerned with the design of a knowledge base for traditional African medicine. This will integrate knowledge not only about the traditional medical prescriptions themselves, together with their methods of preparation and means of administration, but also knowledge from a wide range of fields which can supplement the traditional lore and help the understanding of it. These include botanical, biological, biochemical, chemical, pharmacological, ecological, and ethnogeographic information. The knowledge base will also support cross-referencing this information with a bibliographic database.
The project could be extended to incorporate knowledge about traditional medicines from other cultures.
January 1997 to August 1997.
University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon
In many developing countries in Africa, the facilities for modern health care are not only insufficient, being concentrated mainly in the larger cities, but also expensive. This puts them beyond the reach of many people, particularly those in rural communities, both geographically and financially. As a result, many people are turning back to traditional African medicine as the only viable source of medical treatment.
In general, however, traditional African culture is oral, and the traditional doctors, many of whom are illiterate, transmit their knowledge verbally from father to son and from mother to daughter. Knowledge is therefore easily lost, either if a family has no descendents or if the children forsake the traditional ways in favour of a more Western style culture.
The project seeks to redress this trend by providing a basis for the storing of information on medicinal plants and traditional medicine, and by collecting and storing information from the practitioners to ensure that the knowledge is preserved and promoted.
One fellow from the University of Yaoundé I carried out a high-level informal analysis of African traditional medicine and began work on a formal specification of a knowledge base which supports the storage and retrieval of data about traditional African medicine and which allows cross-referencing of this information to data from other scientific disciplines. A draft proposal for future work was also produced.