MeSH RDF Technical Documentation

Concepts

A concept is a class in MeSH RDF with the name meshv:Concept. MeSH Concepts are all assigned ‘M’ identifiers. A MeSH Concept represents a unit of meaning. Each MeSH record consists of one or more Concepts, and each Concept consists in one or more synonymous terms. Collections of concepts that may be useful for search and retrieval on a given topic are placed into the same MeSH Descriptor. A concept is considered ‘preferred’ if its name is used by the descriptor to which it belongs. For more information about Concepts, visit the NLM MeSH Concept Structure page. The diagram below illustrates the relations and properties of meshv:Concept classes.

RDF Graph Diagram

meshv:Concept - Relations and Properties

SPARQL

The RDF output shown in the diagram above can be generated with the following SPARQL query:

prefix mesh: <http://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/>
prefix meshv: <http://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/vocab#>

construct {
    mesh:D000001 meshv:preferredConcept ?prefcon .
    ?prefcon ?p ?o .
}
from <http://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh>
where {
    mesh:D000001 meshv:preferredConcept ?prefcon .
    ?prefcon ?p ?o .
}