Accepted for/Published in: Online Journal of Public Health Informatics
Date Submitted: Sep 17, 2023
Date Accepted: Feb 19, 2024
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An ontology-based abstraction of social and economic characteristics impacting health outcomes
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
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Copyright
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