Using Semantic Web Technologies to Reproduce a Pharmacovigilance Case Study

We provide a detailed report of a reproduction study of a paper published in the International Journal of Medical Sciences (IJMS). We first use the PROV-O ontology to model our reconstruction of the computational workflow of the original experiment and to systematically explicate all information that is needed for an reproduction study. We then identify which part of the required information is published in the IJMS paper and what part is missing. We then discuss our reproduction of this workflow, following the original as much as possible. Again, we use PROV-O to precisely define our version of the workflow, including our version of the information that was missing in the IJMS paper of the study. Finally, we generalize from the specific cased described in the original paper by providing a web service that allows mining for arbitrary drug-adverse event pairs.