The ontology of medically related social entities: recent developments.

Amanda Hicks,Mathias Brochhausen,Daniel Welch,William R Hogan,Josh Hanna

doi:10.1186/s13326-016-0087-8

Abstract

BackgroundThe Ontology of Medically Related Social Entities (OMRSE) was initially developed in 2011 to provide a framework for modeling demographic data in Resource Description Framework/Web Ontology Language. It is built upon the Basic Formal Ontology and conforms to Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry’s best practices.DescriptionWe report recent development of OMRSE which includes representations of organizations, roles, facilities, demographic data, enrollment in insurance plans, and data about socio-economic indicators.ConclusionsOMRSE’s coverage has been expanding in recent years to include a wide variety of classes and has been useful in several biomedical applications.

Highlights

The Ontology of Medically Related Social Entities (OMRSE) was initially developed in 2011 to provide a framework for modeling demographic data in Resource Description Framework/Web Ontology Language
We created a framework for defining gender roles, legal roles, healthcare provider roles, healthcare organization roles, and patient roles in Web Ontology Language (OWL), one of the accepted languages for the OBO Foundry and a standard for the Semantic Web
It is designed to bridge the gap between the upper ontology, Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), and more specific domain ontologies as well as provide classes for reuse in application ontologies

Summary

Background

The Ontology of Medically Related Social Entities (OMRSE) [1] is a realist representation of medically related social entities. We created a framework for defining gender roles, legal roles, healthcare provider roles, healthcare organization roles, and patient roles in Web Ontology Language (OWL), one of the accepted languages for the OBO Foundry and a standard for the Semantic Web. We have since developed this ontology by adding more specific classes and creating frameworks for additional topics to facilitate uses arising out of projects related to epidemic modeling, the organizational structure of trauma systems, and common health care data models. The CAFÉ Project reuses OMRSE classes in the Ontology of Organizational Structures of Trauma centers and Trauma systems (OOSTT) (http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/oostt.owl). We searched OntoBee or Bioportal for existing classes in BFO-based ontologies before adding new ones to OMRSE. BFO 2.0 Conversion The only modification to OMRSE that was required to complete this conversion was to import version 2015-1007 of the Relation Ontology [14]

Utility and discussion

Limitations

Conclusion