Biomedical sciences increasingly use controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, and ontologies to reflect and represent the current state of knowledge. However, these critical biomedical information repositories are sparse and outdated. Consequently, The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) commenced a multi-year ontology building initiative.
Full and accurate representation of behavioral and social sciences terminology is essential for fully integrating the disciple with the larger biomedical enterprise. Furthermore, the developed ontologies should be linkable across BSSR domains and integrated with existing biomedical ontologies.
Hence, in 2016, the BSSR-Coordinating Committee established a Behavioral Ontology Development working group to explore the possibility of building taxonomies. The working group applied natural language processing tools to the corpus of BSSR literature using key terminology searches within a given domain. Though practical, this relatively unsupervised approach was inadequate for refining and defining terminology structures. There was a need to include Subject matter experts (SMEs) during each iteration for the eventual ontology to have real utility for researchers. Therefore, with the goals of more fully engaging SMEs in terminology evaluation and potential consensus building for controlled vocabularies, the working group began integrating calls for ontology development into Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs).
The working group also engaged the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and other sponsors to complete a Consensus Study on "Accelerating Behavioral Science Through Ontology Development and Use." The work began in March 2021, and a full report is expected later this year. The report will help inform the next steps to move the BSSR domains forward.
Additionally, OBSSR has initiated a project to enhance the integration of up-to-date BSSR terms into MeSH. As of its latest 2021 update, MeSH now includes 261 additional terms/synonyms within the domain of attention, learning, and memory and 46 for Social Determinants of Health (SDoH). Thirty more SDoH terms will be added in 2022 and 2023.
The working group regards these efforts as an essential base for enhancing engagement in ontology development and use in BSSR.
Click here to read the original article published by OBSSR.
Please give your feedback on this article or share a similar story for publishing by clicking here.
