JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), a set of negative events and processes that a person might encounter during childhood and adolescence, have been proven to be linked to increased risks of a multitude of negative health outcomes and conditions when children reach adulthood and beyond.

Objective:

To better understand the relationship between ACEs and the associated health outcomes and eventually to pan and implement preventive interventions the access to an integrated coherent data set is needed. Therefore, we implement a formal ontology as a resource for the mental health community to facilitate data integration and knowledge modeling ACEs’ surveillance and research.

Methods:

We use advanced knowledge representation and semantic web tools and techniques to implement the ontology. The current implementation of the ontology is expressed in the description logic ALCRIQ(D), a sub-logic of Web Ontology Language (OWL 2).

Results:

The Adverse Childhood Experiences Surveillance (ACEs) Ontology has been implemented and made available to the mental health community and public via BioPortal repository. Moreover, multiple use case scenarios have been introduced to showcase and evaluate the usability of the ontology in action. The ontology is created to be used by major actors of the ACEs community with different applications from the diagnosis of individuals and the potential negative outcomes that they encounter to the prevention of ACEs in a population and designing interventions and policies.

Conclusions:

The Semantic Platform for Adverse Childhood Experiences Surveillance (SPACES) and its associated ACEs ontology provide a uniform and reusable integrated knowledge structure to improve ACEs surveillance and evaluation. Clinical Trial: N/A