Environmental Health Science— Cross Domain Ontology Research (EHS-CORE) Project Collaborative Expedition Workshop #38, February 22, 2005, National Science Foundation Jane Greenberg, Associate Professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (SILS/UNC—CH) Abe Crystal, Research Assistant and Doctoral Student, SILS/UNC W. Davenport Robertson, Library Director, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Obesity and the Built Environment: An Interdisciplinary Challenge  Obesity in America has become an “epidemic.” (Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson)  Accounts for more than 300,000 premature deaths each year, direct health care costs in excess of $61 billion  Burden significantly greater in the lower socioeconomic strata, minority and vulnerable populations.  Promising solution—integrate physical activity into daily life by improving the built environment—the physical surroundings in which one lives and works.  Interdisciplinary nature of obesity and the built environment

Problem: “Information Silos”  Researchers are unaware of useful data and literature sources in related disciplines, beyond their immediate scope, because they are confronted with information silos  Scenario 1: we know it’s there, but “it’s roll the dice whether or not we find it”  Scenario 2: we don’t know it’s there (student PubMed search misses many relevant databases)  Researchers aware of resources in other domains must locate all relevant and independent data sources, interact with each data source in isolation, and manually combine results

Problem impact  Researchers face:  A labor-intensive and inefficient interdisciplinary research experience (hard to find/integrate data and literature from outside own domain)  Difficulty in locating “undiscovered public knowledge” (Swanson, 1986)—research from disparate disciplines, that when combined can solve an open problem  Duplicative research resulting from the absence of knowledge about research in related, but pertinent disciplines

Solution: information integration Research goals of proposed project:  Integrate existing domain-specific ontologies to provide uniform intellectual access to interdisciplinary data and literature on obesity and the built environment.  Use Semantic Web metadata and technologies to provide powerful querying and inferencing capabilities on the integrated ontology.  Develop an ontology server capable of dynamically incorporating changes (i.e., “just-in-time” integration) in domain-specific ontologies (e.g., new or revised vocabularies) into the integrated ontology.

Proposed Research Team  Domain science (nutrition and public health)  UNC School of Public Health, Active Living by Design  Ontology engineering and systems development (computer science)  MINDSWAP/UMD  Ontology and Web semantics development and evaluation (information science)  Metadata Research Center/SILS/UNC-CH

Information Integration: Ontological Solutions Functional criteria  Integrate ontologies from different domains/disciplines, using standard languages such as OWL  Provide access to disparate and distributed data and literature  Update vocabulary dynamically (on the fly, or at frequent intervals) based on changes in host ontologies

Information Integration: Ontological Solutions (2) Technical criteria  The components must be openly accessible, preferably open source, and listed in a standard registry.  They must use open enabling technologies and standards, such as:  Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)  Resource Descriptor Format (RDF), RDFS, and OWL (Web Ontology Language)

Implementation  Domain research  Multi-method approach (interviews, log analysis…)  Ontology mapping  Standardization, pruning, mapping, testing, reviewing, etc.  Ontology server  Define functional requirements, system architecture, prototyping, evaluation  Document Cataloging  Document sampling, cataloging (Dublin Core), metadata evaluation  Unified interface  Define functional requirements, prototyping, connect to ontology server, usability testing

Three Key Impacts  Addresses a major social problem, epidemic obesity  Validates an approach to dynamic ontological integration approach, which may be applicable to many domains  Facilitates cross-domain research, leading to increased scientific productivity and discovery

Project Status  Beginning preliminary fieldwork  Pending proposals: NSF (system design and ontological integration), IMLS (user access to resource collection at ALbD)  Environmental Health Science Thesaurus Forum (buy-in by many)

Selected References  Greenberg, J. (2004a). Metadata Extraction and Harvesting: A Comparison of Two Automatic Metadata Generation Applications. Journal of Internet Cataloging, 6(4):  Gruber, TR. (1993). A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specification. Knowledge Acquisition, 5:  Gruber, TR. (1994). Toward Principles for the Design of Ontolgoies Used for Knowledge Sharing. IJHSC, 43 (5/6):  Guarino, N. (1998). Formal Ontology and Information Systems. In: N. Guarino, editor, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Formal Ontologies in Information Systems, FOIS '98, Trento, Italy, June, 1998, ISO Press, pp  Kalyanpur, A, Sirin E, Parsia B, and Hendler, J. (2004). Hypermedia inspired Ontology Engineering Environment: Swoop. Submitted to ISWC 2004 as a poster. [Online]. Available  Lauser, B., Wildemann, T., Poulos, A., Fisseha, F., Keizer, J., and Katz, S. A Comprehensive Framework for Building Multilingual Domain Ontologies: Creating a Prototype Biosecurity Ontology. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata for e-Communities, 2002, Florence, Italy. October Firenze: Firenze University Press, pp , [Online]  Robertson, WD, and Greenberg, J. (2004). Architecting a Cross-Disciplinary Thesaurus for the Semantic Web. DC-2004: Metadata across Languages and Cultures. Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, October 11-14, 2004, Shanghai, China.  Sowa, J. F. (2002). Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics, International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS '2000, August 14-18, Darmstadt, Germany.  Swanson, D. R. (1986). Undiscovered Public Knowledge. Library Quarterly, 56:  Shanghai: Shanghai Scientific & Technological Literature Publishing House, pp