Open Self Medication on LOD Olivier Cur´ e Universit´ e Paris-Est, LIGM, CNRS UMR 8049, France ocure@univ-mlv.fr Abstract. Open Self Medication 1 is a Web application that better in- forms people when treating undiagnosed medical ailments with unpre- scribed, over the counter drugs, i.e., self-medicating. The application achieves this goal by providing a set of functionalities that ensure safety and efficiency of this practice. With safety, we mean that the system guides the end-user from a set of common mild medical signs to adapted molecules and drug products, but also highlights the risks, e.g., drug in- teractions, adverse events, of self prescribing a drug in a given situation. The efficiency argument corresponds to providing a rating, based on a tolerance/efficiency ratio designed by a team of health care professionals, to some identified self-medication molecules. A main characteristic of this application is that almost all the data processed by the system and pre- sented to the end-user comes from a subset of the LOD datasets, namely DrugBank, DailyMed, Sider and DBPedia. This paper motivates the de- sign of such an application, provides the design choices, describes some implementation details and presents lessons learned and future work. 1 Motivation In OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, due to the emergence and wide distribution of new drugs as well as the aging of populations, the consumption of pharmaceuticals keeps increasing every year and in 2009, the associated bill has been estimated to USD 700 billion, i.e., 19% of the total health spending [6]. It is considered that this rise of drug products consumption has not been followed by an improvement of the general public’s medical knowledge. That is, the general public totally relies on the skills of health care professionals when it comes to consuming drugs. This is quite risky since this same OECD document reports that self-medication or over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceutical products typically account for around 15% of the total spending. This is exacerbated since 2008, the beginning of the financial crisis, with self-medication, i.e., the act of treating undiagnosed medical ailments with unprescribed drugs, being considered one of the most dynamic drug markets for pharmaceutical companies. Most experts of the domain consider that this practice will accentuate in the coming years and countries, like France, are already switching molecule sets from originally prescribed to OTC and thus opening them to the self-medication market. 1 http://srvisis01.univ-mlv.fr/selfMed/