Ontology of Cancer Related Social-Ecological Variables

Several social-ecological (SE) factors affect human behavior. Analysis of these factors is an integral part of behavior research. An efficient method of scrutinizing these predictors is multilevel analysis. Social Ecological Model (SEM) is a multilevel framework that helps to capture all the variables at five levels: individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and policy. This work aims to develop a reference ontology with classes that correspond to SE predictors that influence cancer diagnosis, beginning with the individual level of SEM. This ontology is built with an aim to aid data integration in order to carry out multilevel analysis of the integrated data. The broad hypothesis is that, if all the variables gathered from various sources and at different levels of the SEM are configured in an ontology, there will be enough information to identify and visualize association between these variables and health outcomes. This work is focused on 13 SE variables which were first identified by performing a scoping literature review. Manually curated terms corresponding to these variables were aligned with existing ontology classes. The ontology of cancer related socialecological variables (OCRSEV) is built upon the Basic Formal Ontology 2.0 (BFO 2.0) and conforms to Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry’s best practices. Future work is planned to extend the ontology for variables in other levels of SEM and map the PCORnet Common Data Model (PCORnet CDM) data and other relevant data with these variables in the ontology.