TCM-Grid: Weaving a medical Grid for traditional Chinese medicine

We present a TCM-Grid for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The purpose of the TCM-Grid is to aid the development of distributed systems that help health professionals, researchers, enterprizes and personal users to retrieve, integrate and share TCM information and knowledge from geographically decentralized TCM database resources and knowledge base resources in China. Our approach involves developing a Database Grid for discovering and accessing TCM database resources coordinately and a Knowledge Base Grid supporting TCM knowledge sharing globally. With our application experience, we argue that nowadays' Grid architecture is not enough: we need Database Grid to support finely granular data sharing and integration, and we also need a Knowledge Base Grid to support knowledge-intensive task. We also recommend a Grid Ontology effort to enable Grid intelligence.