CTSA Ontology Workshop

Venue: To be determined, almost certainly at a hotel close to a major Florida airport

Date: February 11-12, 2013

Principal Focus

The principal focus of the meeting is on the use of ontologies in the evaluation of scientific research, and specifically in the evaluation of CTSA activities. The proposal is that when data are harvested from institutional sources, these data can be aggregated using common ontologies such as are maintained by the eagle-i and VIVO initiatives.

As these data accumulate they can be compared at regular intervals for purposes of tracking and evaluation of research activities. The system could be used to generate reports on research activities filtered by type, location, or temporally defined range.

Interestingly, the use of common ontologies will mean that the data could also be exploited for other purposes. First, they will make all research-relevant activities easily searchable in something like the way that publications databases such as PubMed and Google Scholar already make publications easily searchable. Second, they will make results of different sorts of research activities combinable, since the same ontologies will be used to annotate, for example, clinical studies, as are used to describe mentorship opportunities or patient outreach initiatives. Third, because common ontologies are being used, all of the information collected will discoverable not only be those working within the collecting institution, but also by individuals, institutions and software agents, on the outside.

Subgoals

The specific subgoals of the meeting are as follows (suggestions welcome):

1. To identify existing experiments in ontology-based tracking and evaluation of research activities, especially within the framework of the CTSA consortium, and to share the lessons learned from such experiments

2. To identify the sorts of data which might be imported into an ontology-based tracking and evaluation system, including:

university-wide reporting data

national data for example pertaining to grants, patents

social networking data for example pertaining to existing collaborations, including mentoring

clinical study data for example available through IRBnet

Electronic Health Record data pertaining to clinicians and clinician expertise

3. To identify software and systems that can be of service in the implementation of a working tracking and evaluation system along the lines described

4. To explore a strategy to create an evaluation and tracking system for an organization like a CTSA based on, or working with, a university-wide system for faculty reporting and to identify potential collaborators working on or interested in the implementation of different aspects of such a strategy.

This meeting will also serve as the inaugural meeting of the new CTSA Ontology Affinity Group

Participants will include:

Sivaram Arabandi (Smart Content Team, Elsevier)

Mathias Brochhausen (Arkansas CTSA)

Michael Conlon (University of Florida CTSA / VIVO)

James Demery (University of Florida CTSA)

Melissa Haendel (Oregon / CTSAconnect)

William Hogan (Arkansas CTSA)

Warren Kibbe (Northwestern CTSA)

Barry Smith (Buffalo)

Dagobert Soergel (Buffalo)

Carlo Torniai (Oregon / CTSAconnect)

Organizers: William Hogan and Barry Smith

Sponsor: Translational Research Institute of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

Further information: Please write to Barry Smith