Ontology Engineering and The Public Health Reference Ontology

Public health is dependent upon acquisition and understanding of data from a wide range of sources including structured and unstructured text.  In order to make the best use of this data, it must be supported by a knowledge framework to provide some degree of automated reasoning against incoming data sources, including the standardization of that data for later retrieval.  Ontologies have emerged as extremely useful applications to manage knowledge across multiple federal health architecture partners.  The Centers for Disease Control is part of that group of federal health architecture partners currently leveraging the power of ontological reasoning in the support of a wide range of application services.  The point of this session will be to introduce the public health partners of the CDC to one of the core ontology is used in implementing knowledge services at the Centers for Disease Control.  This presentation will provide an introduction to the standard vocabularies, domain model, and technologies used in the development of CDC’s Public Health Reference Model. It will review the decisions required to implement terminologies, common data elements and models that make up the knowledge repository. This presentation will provide an overview of the ontology-engineering paradigm. It will serve as an educational foundation for understanding the technology, discipline and promise of ontologies for public health. Following this introduction, the presentation will provide an introduction to the public health reference ontology, its PHIN and HL7 model foundations, the CHI standard terminology sources, and the constrained relationships represented within the model.