An ontology design for validating childhood cancer registry data

Ontologies can provide a valuable role in the work of cancer registration, particularly as a tool for managing and navigating the various classification systems and coding rules. Further advantages accrue from the ability to formalise the coding rule base using description logics and thereby benefit...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Nicholson N, Giusti F, Martos C
Tipo de documento: artigo
Estado:Versão publicada
Data de publicação:2023
País:España
Recursos:Fundación para el Fomento de la Investigación Sanitaria y Biomédica de la Comunitat Valenciana (FISABIO)
Repositório:r-FISABIO. Repositorio Institucional de Producción Científica
OAI Identifier:oai:fisabio.fundanetsuite.com:p15487
Acesso em linha:https://fisabio.portalinvestigacion.com/publicaciones/15487
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:ontology design
description logic
data validation
data harmonization
cancer registration
childhood cancer
Descrição
Resumo:Ontologies can provide a valuable role in the work of cancer registration, particularly as a tool for managing and navigating the various classification systems and coding rules. Further advantages accrue from the ability to formalise the coding rule base using description logics and thereby benefit from the associated automatic reasoning functionality. Drawing from earlier work that showed the viability of applying ontologies in the data validation tasks of cancer registries, an ontology was created using a modular approach to handle the specific checks for childhood cancers. The ontology was able to handle successfully the various inter-variable checks using the axiomatic constructs of the web ontology language. Application of an ontological approach for data validation can greatly simplify the maintenance of the coding rules and facilitate the federation of any centralised validation process to the local level. It also provides an improved means of visualising the rule interdependencies from different perspectives. Performance of the automatic reasoning process can be a limiting issue for very large datasets and will be a focus for future work. Results are provided showing how the ontology is able to validate cancer case records typical for childhood tumours.