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)
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Selected References
Greenberg, J. (2004a). Metadata Extraction and Harvesting: A Comparison of Two Automatic
Metadata Generation Applications. Journal of Internet Cataloging, 6(4): 59-82.
Gruber, TR. (1993). A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specification. Knowledge
Acquisition, 5: 199-220.
Gruber, TR. (1994). Toward Principles for the Design of Ontolgoies Used for Knowledge
Sharing. IJHSC, 43 (5/6): 907-928.
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. 2-15.
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
http://www.mindswap.org/papers/SWOOP-Poster.pdf
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 13-17. Firenze: Firenze University Press, pp.
113-123, 2002. [Online] http://www.bncf.net/dc2002/program/ft/paper13.pdf.
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: 103-118.
Shanghai: Shanghai Scientific & Technological Literature Publishing House, pp. 231-235.