Feedback loops are vital for decision-making and behavior change in health systems, but not all feedback is of equal value. Clinical performance feedback to healthcare professionals and teams has potential for large effects on clinical practice, but evidence suggests that low-value performance feedback is widespread. A primary barrier to understanding the value of feedback loops in health systems may be a lack of a well-defined model and shared semantics for the information that they carry. An ontology for audit and feedback research may be used to address these issues by standardizing feedback intervention metadata. Research describing feedback interventions recognizes differences between the content of the feedback and its delivery process. However, terms describing feedback intervention content are inconsistent, and appear to vary considerably between audit and feedback frameworks, which can result in confusion around what is being delivered in a performance summary. Our objective was to develop an ontology of a performance summary in a clinical performance feedback intervention for the purposes of standardizing metadata. We developed the Performance Summary Display Ontology (PSDO) iteratively by 1) identifying terms for classes from behavior change theories relating to feedback interventions and cognitive theories of visualization, 2) searching for relevant existing ontologies and classes, and 3) using the terms to specify information content and visual displays in published examples of dashboard displays and feedback reports. PSDO is a lightweight application ontology that specifies performance information content and its representations for the purpose of feedback intervention research and evaluation. PSDO contains 3 primary domains: 1) Performance information content, based on constructs from behavior change theories, 2) Marks and their qualities, based on constructs from visualization theories, and 3) roles that link marks, information content, and other emergent characteristics, as interpreted information. PSDO may enable standardization of metadata for the study of feedback interventions.
Ontologies have emerged to become critical to support data and knowledge representation, standardization, integration, and analysis. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic led to the rapid proliferation of COVID-19 data, as well as the development of many COVID-19 ontologies. In the interest of supporting data interoperability, we initiated a community-based effort to harmonize COVID-19 ontologies. Our effort involves the collaborative discussion among developers of seven COVID-19 related ontologies, and the merging of four ontologies. This effort demonstrates the feasibility of harmonizing these ontologies in an interoperable framework to support integrative representation and analysis of COVID-19 related data and knowledge.
The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the rapid dissemination of papers and preprints investigating the disease and its associated virus, SARS-CoV-2. The multifaceted nature of COVID-19 demands a multidisciplinary approach, but the urgency of the crisis combined with the need for social distancing measures present unique challenges to collaborative science. We applied a massive online open publishing approach to this problem using Manubot. Through GitHub, collaborators summarized and critiqued COVID-19 literature, creating a review manuscript. Manubot automatically compiled citation information for referenced preprints, journal publications, websites, and clinical trials. Continuous integration workflows retrieved up-to-date data from online sources nightly, regenerating some of the manuscript's figures and statistics. Manubot rendered the manuscript into PDF, HTML, LaTeX, and DOCX outputs, immediately updating the version available online upon the integration of new content. Through this effort, we organized over 50 scientists from a range of backgrounds who evaluated over 1,500 sources and developed seven literature reviews. While many efforts from the computational community have focused on mining COVID-19 literature, our project illustrates the power of open publishing to organize both technical and non-technical scientists to aggregate and disseminate information in response to an evolving crisis.
Objective: to identify on the basis of a use case major problem types novices in realism-based ontology design face when attempting to construct an ontology intended to explain differences and commonalities between competing scientific theories.
Methodology: an ontology student was tasked (1) to extract manually from a paper about five distinct motivational learning theories the scientific terms used to explain the theories, (2) to map these terms where possible to type-terms from existing realism-based ontologies or create new ones otherwise, (3) to indicate for new type-terms their immediate subsumer, and (4) to document at every step issues that were encountered.
Results: where term extraction and type-term assignment were handled satisfactorily, correct classification in function of the BFO was a major challenge. Root causes identified included ambiguous and underspecified term use in the theories, the ontological status of psychological constructs, lack of high quality ontologies for the behavioral sciences and insufficient 'deep' understanding of some BFO entities, in part because of insufficient documentation thereof suitable for learners. The issues the student encountered were often insufficiently described for the instructor to identify the problem without analyzing the source paper itself.
Conclusion: whereas behavioral scientists need to do efforts to make their theories comparable, realism-based ontologies can help them therein only when ontology developers and educators put more effort in making them more accessible without violating the principles.
Driven by the use cases of PubChemRDF and SCAIView, we have developed a first community-based clinical trial ontology (CTO) by following the OBO Foundry principles. CTO uses the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the top level ontology and reuses many terms from existing ontologies. CTO has also defined many clinical trial-specific terms. The general CTO design pattern is based on the PICO framework together with two applications. First, the PubChemRDF use case demonstrates how a drug Gleevec is linked to multiple clinical trials investigating Gleevec's related chemical compounds. Second, the SCAIView text mining engine shows how the use of CTO terms in its search algorithm can identify publications referring to COVID-19-related clinical trials. Future opportunities and challenges are discussed.
This paper documents the OhioT1DM Dataset, which was developed to promote and facilitate research in blood glucose level prediction. It contains eight weeks' worth of continuous glucose monitoring, insulin, physiological sensor, and self-reported life-event data for each of 12 people with type 1 diabetes. An associated graphical software tool allows researchers to visualize the integrated data. The paper details the contents and format of the dataset and tells interested researchers how to obtain it. The OhioT1DM Dataset was first released in 2018 for the first Blood Glucose Level Prediction (BGLP) Challenge. At that time, the dataset was half its current size, containing data for only six people with type 1 diabetes. Data for an additional six people is being released in 2020 for the second BGLP Challenge. This paper subsumes and supersedes the paper which documented the original dataset.
The objective of this paper is to propose formal definitions for the terms 'protein aggregate' and 'protein-containing complex' such that the descriptions and usages of these terms in biomedical literature are unified and that those portions of reality are correctly represented. To this end, we surveyed the literature to assess the need for a distinction between these entities, then compared the features of usages and definitions found in the literature to the definitions for those terms found in Bioportal ontologies. Based on the results of this comparison, we propose updated definitions for the terms 'protein aggregate' and 'protein-containing complex'. Thus far, we propose the following distinguishing factors: first, that one important difference lies in whether an entity is disposed to change type in response to certain structural alterations, such as dissociation of a continuant part, and second that an important difference lies in the ability of the entity to realize its function after such an event occurs. These distinctions are reflected in the proposed definitions.
In this study, we introduce an ontology-driven software engine to provide dialogue interaction functionality for a conversational agent for HPV vaccine counseling. Currently, the HPV vaccination rates are low that risks unprotected individuals at being infected with HPV, a virus that leads to life-threatening cancers. In addition, we developed a question answering subsystem to support the dialogue engine. In this paper, we discuss our design and development of an ontology-driven dialogue engine that uses the Patient Health Information Dialogue Ontology, an ontology that we previously developed, and a question answering subsystem based on various previous methods to supplement the dialogue engine's interaction with the user. Our next step is to test the functional ability of the ontology-driven software components and deploy the engine in a live environment to be integrated with a speech interface.

