Proto-OKN Theme 1: Creating A Cross-Domain Knowledge Graph to Integrate Health and Justice for Rural Resilience

Enhancing the resilience of our nation’s rural communities in the face of various public health crises is a matter of pressing importance. These are regions of the country that are vital to the long-term preservation of essential societal services such as air quality, water supply, food production, and supply chains—a realization that has been underscored by the CoVID-19 pandemic experience. This Prototype-Open Knowledge Network project seeks to work with collaborators to map out the integrated data capabilities required for rural resilience, particularly in the context of public health and environmental crises. The project will coordinate with other related efforts to help enhance rural resilience in the areas of public health and the environmental. Central to this objective is the ability to collect and analyze data related to health outcomes and climate change along with social determinants of health and justice within rural locales. The cross-domain integrated health and justice knowledge graph will provide a comprehensive and accessible information resource to serve a variety of applications in resource allocation, policy development, and partnership establishment within rural communities. The project will generate a robust collection of learning science methodologies, computational models, design frameworks, software artifacts, and empirical data to provide a rich resource to further advance the use of knowledge graphs in rural public health. The project tackles data challenges in heterogeneity, sparsity, and privacy of data using transfer learning and generative learning mechanisms across a variety of datasets, with an emphasis on those data that provide social and cultural context. It makes advances in social science research via the use of a community-based participatory research model for developing a knowledge graph by actively engaging domain knowledge experts along with a broad spectrum of stakeholders. The methods employed involve construction of an interdisciplinary knowledge graph designed to merge, portray, and interconnect previously separate health and justice data sets. The project intends to utilize existing geo-enrichment services offered by resources such as the NSF-funded KnowWhereGraph open knowledge network. The resulting knowledge resource can help researchers, practitioners, and educators in their understanding of risk environments and resilience of rural locales. Working with the Alabama Department of Public Health and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the project will target a diverse group of stakeholders that includes interdisciplinary researchers, educators, students, school administrators, and industry partners across multiple practice domains. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.