OCRe: An Ontology of Clinical Research

Human studies are the most important source of evidence for advancing our understanding of health and disease. Yet there is no standard method for investigators to query for studies that are relevant to their scientific hypothesis. Querying data and meta-data across clinical trials and observational studies is difficult because of the lack of semantic and terminology standards for describing the design and methods of human studies, and because of the variety of clinical terminology standards used. The Ontology of Clinical Research (OCRe) is a formal ontology for describing human studies that provides methods for binding to external information standards (e.g. BRIDG) and clinical terminologies (e.g. SNOMED CT). It allows the indexing of research studies across multiple study designs, interventions/exposures, outcomes, and health conditions. With such indexing, investigators interested in the evidence pertaining to a particular question (e.g., what is the effect of A on B in people with C) will be able to locate relevant research studies more easily across disparate data sources. The ontology was developed using Protégé 4 beta.