Ontological engineering for the definition of a COVID-19 pandemic ontology

Abstract

COVID-19 has generated a lot of information in different formats, and one of them is in the ontology format. Also, there are previous ontologies from other disciplines that can help to analyze the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, due to the large quantity of COVID-19 information in the form of ontologies, approaches to ontology integration and interoperability could be beneficial. In this context, this research proposes a new ontology, called COVID-19 Pandemic ontology, which is the product of an ontological engineering process proposed in this research that allows the integration of several ontologies to cover all the aspects of this infectious disease. The ontological engineering process defines tasks of fusion, alignment, and linking for integrating the ontologies. The resulting pandemic ontology provides a simple repository for storing information about the COVID-19, reusing existing ontologies, to offer multiple views about the disease, including the social context. This ontology has been tested in different case studies to prove its capabilities to infer useful information about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Knowledge Representation and Management 2022: Findings in Ontology Development and Applications

“…We obtained 387 papers after the section editors' initial screening. The section editors further reviewed these papers jointly and reached a consensus list of 15 papers, which were nominated as the candidate best papers [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. External reviewers, IMIA Yearbook editors and section editors further evaluated these 15 papers and finally selected two best papers (see Table 1).…”

“…The paper from González-Eras et al [14] presented the engineering process of integrating multiple existing COVID-19 related ontologies to construct a new ontology called COVID-19 Pandemic Ontology, comprehensively covering various aspects of the infectious disease. The integration process involved matching, linking, and merging tasks.…”

CIRO: COVID-19 infection risk ontology

“…The CODO has been developed using agile methods, and the ontology continues to be extended. Additionally, González-Eras et al [ 24 ] claimed the need for integration and interoperability of the various ontologies related to COVID-19. Using ontological engineering processes, they merged CODO and WHO COVID-19 Rapid Version CRF semantic data model (COVIDCRFRAPID) [ 25 ].…”

A survey of epidemic management data models

“…González-Eras et al 33 constructed an ontological engineering method to build COVID-19-related ontologies. They integrated existing COVID-19 ontologies such as CODO and COVIDCRFRAPID and then constructed an ontology called Tepuy-COVID.…”