Adverse Childhood Experiences Ontology for Mental Health Surveillance, Research, and Evaluation: Advanced Knowledge Representation and Semantic Web Techniques.

Jon Hael Brenas,Arash Shaban-Nejad,Eun Kyong Shin

doi:10.2196/13498

Jon Hael Brenas, Arash Shaban-Nejad + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.2196/13498

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Abstract

BackgroundAdverse 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.ObjectiveTo better understand the relationship between ACEs and their relevant risk factors with associated health outcomes and to eventually design and implement preventive interventions, access to an integrated coherent dataset is needed. Therefore, we implemented a formal ontology as a resource to allow the mental health community to facilitate data integration and knowledge modeling and to improve ACEs’ surveillance and research.MethodsWe 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 sublogic of Web Ontology Language (OWL 2).ResultsThe ACEs Ontology has been implemented and made available to the mental health community and the public via the BioPortal repository. Moreover, multiple use-case scenarios have been introduced to showcase and evaluate the usability of the ontology in action. The ontology was created to be used by major actors in the ACEs community with different applications, from the diagnosis of individuals and predicting potential negative outcomes that they might encounter to the prevention of ACEs in a population and designing interventions and policies.ConclusionsThe ACEs Ontology provides a uniform and reusable semantic network and an integrated knowledge structure for mental health practitioners and researchers to improve ACEs’ surveillance and evaluation.

Highlights

The study of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their consequences in terms of diseases and health risks has emerged during the past 20 years [1]
We present the ACEs Ontology as a formal reusable resource that can be used by the mental health research community to advance the surveillance and study of ACEs
The Web Ontology Language (OWL) format [23] is the de facto standard to express ontologies; for this reason, and for our ACEs Ontology to be freely reused by the community, the OWL format [23] of the ontology was made available via BioPortal [22]

Summary

Introduction

The study of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their consequences in terms of diseases and health risks has emerged during the past 20 years [1]. Direct indicators, including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, at the individual level and indirect home environment indicators are commonly considered when studying ACEs. In general, ACEs are measured by two main experiences during upbringing and within the home environment: victimization experience and exposure to adversities in the http://mental.jmir.org/2019/5/e13498/ XSLFO RenderX. The exposure to adversities, often referred to as household dysfunction, is measured by family members’ history of substance abuse, mental illness, domestic violence, incarceration, marital status, and financial difficulties leading to food deficiency. These factors influence health outcomes with different degrees and are closely linked to other adversities at the community level and other social determinants of health (SDH). 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

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