Accepted for/Published in: Online Journal of Public Health Informatics
Date Submitted: Sep 17, 2023
Date Accepted: Feb 19, 2024
A Semantic Approach to Describe Social and Economic Characteristics that Impact Health Outcomes: Development of an Ontology for Social Determinants of Health
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) have been described by the World Health Organization as the conditions in which individuals are born, live, work, and age. These conditions can be grouped into three interrelated levels, macro-, meso-, and micro-level determinants.
Objective:
Providing a computable artifact that can link health data to concepts involving the different levels of determinants may improve our understanding of the impact SDoH have on human populations.
Methods:
An experimental ontology was developed to represent knowledge on social and economic characteristics of SDoH. Information from 27 literature sources were analyzed to gather concepts and encoded using OWL2 and Protégé. Four evaluators independently reviewed the ontology axioms using natural language translation. The analyses from the evaluations and selected terminologies from the Basic Formal Ontology were used to create a revised ontology with a broad spectrum of knowledge concepts ranging from the macro-level to micro-level determinants.
Results:
Resulting ontology consisted of 383 classes, 109 object properties, and 748 logical axioms and a reasoning test revealed no inconsistencies.
Conclusions:
The ontology models heterogenous social and economic concepts to represent aspects of SDoH. Future direction will include further expanding the ontology to link with other biomedical ontologies, including alignment for granular semantics.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.