Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Aug 26;18(17):8985.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph18178985.

Catalyzing Knowledge-Driven Discovery in Environmental Health Sciences through a Community-Driven Harmonized Language

Stephanie D Holmgren  1 , Rebecca R Boyles  2 , Ryan D Cronk  3 , Christopher G Duncan  4 , Richard K Kwok  5   6 , Ruth M Lunn  7 , Kimberly C Osborn  8 , Anne E Thessen  9 , Charles P Schmitt  1
Affiliations

Catalyzing Knowledge-Driven Discovery in Environmental Health Sciences through a Community-Driven Harmonized Language

Stephanie D Holmgren et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Harmonized language is critical for helping researchers to find data, collecting scientific data to facilitate comparison, and performing pooled and meta-analyses. Using standard terms to link data to knowledge systems facilitates knowledge-driven analysis, allows for the use of biomedical knowledge bases for scientific interpretation and hypothesis generation, and increasingly supports artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Due to the breadth of environmental health sciences (EHS) research and the continuous evolution in scientific methods, the gaps in standard terminologies, vocabularies, ontologies, and related tools hamper the capabilities to address large-scale, complex EHS research questions that require the integration of disparate data and knowledge sources. The results of prior workshops to advance a harmonized environmental health language demonstrate that future efforts should be sustained and grounded in scientific need. We describe a community initiative whose mission was to advance integrative environmental health sciences research via the development and adoption of a harmonized language. The products, outcomes, and recommendations developed and endorsed by this community are expected to enhance data collection and management efforts for NIEHS and the EHS community, making data more findable and interoperable. This initiative will provide a community of practice space to exchange information and expertise, be a coordination hub for identifying and prioritizing activities, and a collaboration platform for the development and adoption of semantic solutions. We encourage anyone interested in advancing this mission to engage in this community.

Keywords: community of practice; community-driven; controlled vocabulary; environmental health; metadata; ontology; semantic; standards; taxonomy; toxicology.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Community development framework. Sources that influenced and guided this framework include [68,69,70,71].
Figure 2
Figure 2
Proposed community model.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The community model in practice.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Sustaining the community.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Components of building a community.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Prüss-Üstün A., Corvalán C. Preventing Disease through Healthy Environments. Towards an Estimate of the Environmental Burden of Disease. WHO; Geneva, Switzerland: 2006. [(accessed on 23 August 2021)]. Available online: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/43457/9241593822_eng.pd....
    1. Ashburner M., Ball C.A., Blake J.A., Botstein D., Butler H., Cherry J.M., Davis A.P., Dolinski K., Dwight S.S., Eppig J.T., et al. Gene ontology: Tool for the unification of biology. The Gene Ontology Consortium. Nat. Genet. 2000;25:25–29. doi: 10.1038/75556. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Davis A.P., Grondin C.J., Johnson R.J., Sciaky D., McMorran R., Wiegers J., Wiegers T.C., Mattingly C.J. The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database: Update 2019. Nucleic. Acids. Res. 2019;47:D948–D954. doi: 10.1093/nar/gky868. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Mungall C.J., McMurry J.A., Köhler S., Balhoff J.P., Borromeo C., Brush M., Carbon S., Conlin T., Dunn N., Engelstad M., et al. The Monarch Initiative: An integrative data and analytic platform connecting phenotypes to genotypes across species. Nucleic. Acids. Res. 2017;45:D712–D722. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkw1128. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Patlewicz G., Cronin M.T.D., Helman G., Lambert J.C., Lizarraga L.E., Shah I. Navigating through the minefield of read-across frameworks: A commentary perspective. Comput. Toxicol. 2018;6:39–54. doi: 10.1016/j.comtox.2018.04.002. - DOI

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources