Ontologies in the Behavioral Sciences Accelerating Research and the Spread of Knowledge (2022) / Chapter Skim
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4 How Ontologies Facilitate Science
4 How Ontologies Facilitate Science
Pages 73-88
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From page 73... ...
The ability to classify neural pathways based on the neurotransmitters present at their synapses, for example, allows scientists to relate those pathways to a variety of physiological properties and to specific drugs that may affect the behavior of those pathways. The formal specification of both the essential elements of a scientific discipline and the key relationships among them provides an inspectable, shared description of what that discipline is about.
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From page 74... ...
The chapter closes with the committee's conclusions about the ways ontologies can help to advance the behavioral sciences and, indeed, all sciences. HOW ONTOLOGIES FACILITATE SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS The existence of an explicit ontology makes possible many functions that are important not only to scientists, but also to those who rely on the knowledge that scientists produce.
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From page 75... ...
Thus, developers of ontologies try to capture as best they can the scientists' shared conceptualization -- which, in turn, is intended to approximate what exists in the world. But ontologies also need to have pragmatic features that allow them to support the particular goals that researchers have, such as classification, communication, data integration and sharing, bibliographic retrieval, and the comparison and analysis of data.
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From page 76... ...
Ontologies thus allow developers to encode the classifications that they are aware of directly into the structure of an ontology, and to discover new classifications through the application of reasoning systems that determine the logical implications of the ways in which the entities have been defined. An ontology would allow investigators to test hypotheses derived from the logical structure of individual constructs and their relations, though as far as the committee could determine, this benefit of developing and using ontologies has yet to be widely realized in the behavioral sciences.
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From page 77... ...
An example of a behavioral science ontology intended to facilitate communication among scientists is the Cognitive Atlas, a collaborative effort to characterize the current ideas in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience: see Box 4-2. The Cognitive Atlas is intended to compile and systematize concepts used by experts in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience.
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From page 78... ...
The shared ontology term (i.e., the code) thus provides a standard mechanism for workers from many different stakeholder groups -- who have their own customs, their own jargon, their own world views -- to embrace a piece of common information and to act on it accordingly.
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From page 79... ...
Because the relationships between these everyday notions and the constructs defined in behavioral science are rarely delineated clearly, it is important that researchers use standardized terms for the constructs they are studying to eliminate (or at least reduce) the potential for misunderstanding whenever they are communicating with patients and other lay people, including policy makers.
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From page 80... ...
Industrial design and industrial manufacturing could not be unified until ontologies were developed so that CAD and CAM systems could exchange information seamlessly. In the behavioral sciences, there may be a similar strong desire to integrate different data sources, such as clinical data from electronic health record systems and experimental data obtained in the laboratory, but such data integration is stymied in the absence of ontologies that can standardize the terms used in different contexts.
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From page 81... ...
The datasets will not be "findable" unless ontology terms allow researchers to search the metadata of the datasets in a precise manner. The datasets will not be interoperable or reusable unless the datasets have standardized metadata that enable third parties to know what precisely was done in the experiments that generated the data.
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From page 82... ...
In general, formal ontologies support searches that can be more tailored to the user's needs because they allow more abstract or more granular terms related to an initial term of interest to be easily identified and used. Such ontologies may also be able to incorporate external ontologies (such as the Cognitive Atlas, RDoC, or the DSM; see Chapter 3)
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From page 83... ...
. PRIMARY BENEFITS OF ONTOLOGIES What would the behavioral sciences look like if ontologies intended for scientists, clinicians, and users of scientific research were developed to support the functions that we have discussed in this chapter?
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From page 84... ...
Having an articulated definition, hypothesized cause, and operationalization would help to ensure that investigators examining different aspects of the disorder were using a common language, sharing measures and the same logical structure for designing their specific studies. In turn, those advantages should lead to more rapid development and dissemination of new and more effective treatments and preventive interventions.
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From page 85... ...
By establishing shared terms for the concepts and phenomena of interest within a particular domain and a classification of those entities, ontologies make key scientific functions possible, including: • clarification and classification of phenomena being studied; • accurate communication among scientists and other users of scientific research; • precise bibliographic retrieval; • integration, comparison, and analysis of data; and • sharing of data and reuse of data to make new discoveries. Expanding Scientific Knowledge Etymologically, science is the word for what is known.
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From page 86... ...
CONCLUSION CONCLUSION 4-1: By establishing a controlled vocabulary of shared terms for the concepts and phenomena of interest within a particular domain and a classification of those entities, ontologies have three primary benefits: • They open up opportunities to improve care and services, based on the work of investigators studying disorders who use a common language, shared measures, and the same logical structure for designing their specific studies. • They provide an infrastructure to support the mechan ics and application of contemporary scientific research, helping to ensure that conclusions drawn from the data are justified, the procedures used to create the data are replicable, and new discoveries buried in the data do not go undiscovered; framing communication between people and machines; easing the interpretation of complex data sets; and making scientific data an enduring and available resource for all.
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From page 87... ...
. Cognitive Atlas: Employing interaction design processes to facilitate collaboarative ontology creation.
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