ACCELERATE-BASSO: Coordinating Center for Accelerating Behavioral and Social Science through Ontology

ABSTRACT An individual’s phenotypes related to their health conditions are associated with the complex interplay between the individual’s biological, behavioral, social, and environmental processes, including phenomena that occur both within (e.g., genetics, emotion, cognition) and external (e.g., social, built, and natural environments) to the organism. Behavioral and social sciences research (BSSR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the systematic study of behavioral and social phenomena relevant to health—is key to understanding how these internal and external processes interact to alter health, and for developing efficacious interventions. Nevertheless, BSSR of health face substantial challenges in part due to its broad and complex research landscape, but also because of the “inconsistent use of terms and classification systems making it challenging to integrate findings from individual studies and in turn to cumulatively build bodies of knowledge even in domains that are consistently studied.” Ontologies provide a way to address these challenges in BSSR. Recognized and sponsored by the NIH and various other agencies and professional societies, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) formed a multidisciplinary committee to study ways to improve the development and use of ontologies in the BSSR domains and produced a comprehensive consensus report identified barriers, opportunities, and recommended approaches to advancing BSSR ontologies important to health. Motivated by the Report, the NIH aims to create a BSSR ontology development network with research projects (PAR-23-182) covering a wide range of disciplines related to BSSR across multiple NIH Institutes/Centers, with a Dissemination and Coordination Center (DCC; PAR-23-181) to (1) facilitate collaboration and cross-project learning; (2) provide ontology-related technical, computational, and informatics expertise and support; (3) facilitate dissemination of resources and training to support ontology expansion, development, and use; and (4) provide active outreach and coordination with relevant stakeholders to increase understanding of and demand for BSSR ontology-related tools and resources. In response to PAR-23-181, we established a multidisciplinary team with the necessary subject matter expertise to carry out the functionalities of the DCC, leveraging existing ontology resources and tools (e.g., Protégé) that we have developed, and the long-standing ontology community (e.g., BiPortal) we have built and sustained. Our Specific Aims are to (1) provide administrative and logistical support for the U01 Research Network; (2) develop a common technical framework with standard operating procedures (SOPs) to guide the development of BSSR ontologies in the U01 Research Network; and (3) develop a “toolbox” of resources through which the products of the Network can be shared with, and adopted for use, by all the relevant communities.