AEO: A Realism-Based Biomedical Ontology for the Representation of Adverse Events

The Adverse Event Ontology (AEO) is a realism-based biomedical ontology for adverse events. Currently AEO has 484 representational units annotated by means of terms including 369 AEO-specific terms and 115 terms from existing feeder-ontologies. In AEO, the term „adverse event‟ is used exclusively to denote pathological bodily processes that are induced by a medical intervention. This requirement for a causal association between an adverse event and a medical intervention clearly distinguishes our approach from other approaches according to which any untoward phenomenon observed to have appeared in a mere temporal relation with some medical intervention becomes reported as an „adverse event‟. We label such phenomena as being the subject of „adverse event hypotheses‟.