Wikimedia CH’s support for the Wiki Movement is not limited to Switzerland. This time, a project leads us to Tunisia. A medical student there had the exciting idea of optimising free knowledge about diseases, symptoms, medicines, their interactions with other medications and much more. With the help of artificial intelligence and an endless number of test runs, he is currently working on making Wikidata queries in the medical sector much more efficient in the future. The goal is to transform Wikidata into a large-scale biomedical semantic resource that covers most aspects of clinical practice significantly.
The name of this medical student is Houcemeddine Turki (User:Csisc). Reading the profile of the 30-year-old quickly reveals the inspiration for such a huge project: Houcemeddine Turki is a former board member of the Wikimedia TN User Group and Wikimedia and Libraries User Group, member of Wiki Project Med, active contributor to Wikipedia and Wikidata, and former test wiki administrator in Wikimedia Incubator. He was involved in the creation of the first Wikimedia-related research structure in his country named Data Engineering and Semantics and he was a core organizing team of several Wikimedia conferences including Wikimania, WikiIndaba, and WikiConvention Francophone. He also ran for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in 2015. His idea of inviting professors emeriti to contribute to Wikipedia was awarded first place in the IdeaLab Inspire campaign competition in 2017.
With this experience from the Wikiverse and the growing medical background, he realised that structured databases also represent an important resource in healthcare. They provide detailed information on diseases, medications, genes or proteins, and thus simplify the processing and presentation of clinical information of all kinds. However, the introduction of such resources is difficult, especially in the Global South. Often, the financial funding and know-how are missing.
Open knowledge platforms such as Wikidata could help to overcome these obstacles. However, Wikidata has some shortcomings: biomedical informatics is insufficiently represented. Experts have diagnosed critical inconsistencies in the existing data. Houcemeddine Turki aims to heal this with his project.
With his project, he not only intends to transform Wikidata into a biomedical semantic resource, but also to validate the biomedical information freely available in Wikidata. Furthermore, he wants to promote Wikidata for the use of biomedical data in the Global South.
The Wikimedia Foundation awarded a research grant for the project. Wikimedia CH’s Innovation Programme provided one of its 20 servers for the extensive test runs, which require a huge amount of computing power. What is done on this server is another layer of the project to make the biomedical information in Wikidata more robust.
With great passion, the medical student explains all technical processes that are necessary to optimise information networking, and that combine data mining, machine learning, and the newly evolving field of generative artificial intelligence. For non-experts, this rather complex matter quickly turns into an impenetrable jungle of technical terms, formulas and algorithms. But in the end, it becomes evident that the world of freely accessible medical knowledge will take a big step forward thanks to Houcemeddine Turki’s work. Wikimedia CH is proud to have made at least a small contribution to this.
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