SYNONYMY VIDEOS
One Drug Across Multiple Languages and Knowledge Systems
The Drug-term Synonymy interconnects thousands of traditional drug names in Chinese, Malay and 12 South Asian languages, from Sanskrit and Urdu to Tibetan, Persian and Arabic. These are connected through their botanical names, verified by Kew Gardens’ Medicinal Plant Name Services (MPNS), the world’s leading plant name authority. These data also link through to online biodiversity databases that reveal their geographic distribution, as well as biochemical databases which describe molecular components of the plants, and the human genetic targets and modern diseases they treat.
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Visualising Polynomia: Homonyms and Repeated Names
Past societies used drug names inconsistently, attributing multiple names to a single plant, or using the same name to refer to widely different species. This problem of Polynomia has proven an extremely thorny problem for linking traditional textual sources to modern botanical plants.
The Synonymy goes a significant way towards resolving this problem by documenting Homonyms and Repeated Names, so that all possible identities of the plant can be seen at once, and ambiguities so that problems of identification compared and resolved much more easily. It also allows for the textual corpus to be digitally tagged with a single identifier.