An ontology design for validating childhood cancer registry data

Frontiers in Oncology

Oncology

Francesco Giusti¹  Nicholas Nicholson²  Carmen Martos³ 

[1] Belgian Cancer Registry, Brussels, Belgium;European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy;Rare Diseases Research Unit, Foundation for the Promotion of Health and Biomedical Research in the Valencian Region (FISABIO), Valencia, Spain;

关键词: ontology design;    description logic;    data validation;    data harmonization;    cancer registration;    childhood cancer;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fonc.2023.1212434

 received in 2023-04-26, accepted in 2023-06-27,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Ontologies can provide a valuable role in the work of cancer registration, particularly as a tool for managing and navigating the various classification systems and coding rules. Further advantages accrue from the ability to formalise the coding rule base using description logics and thereby benefit from the associated automatic reasoning functionality. Drawing from earlier work that showed the viability of applying ontologies in the data validation tasks of cancer registries, an ontology was created using a modular approach to handle the specific checks for childhood cancers. The ontology was able to handle successfully the various inter-variable checks using the axiomatic constructs of the web ontology language. Application of an ontological approach for data validation can greatly simplify the maintenance of the coding rules and facilitate the federation of any centralised validation process to the local level. It also provides an improved means of visualising the rule interdependencies from different perspectives. Performance of the automatic reasoning process can be a limiting issue for very large datasets and will be a focus for future work. Results are provided showing how the ontology is able to validate cancer case records typical for childhood tumours.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Nicholson, Giusti and Martos