Methods Inf Med 2018; 57(01/02): 55-61
DOI: 10.3414/ME17-01-0109
Original Articles
Schattauer GmbH

SSDOnt: An Ontology for Representing Single-Subject Design Studies

Idoia Berges
1   University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Donostia – San Sebastian, Spain
,
Jesus Bermúdez
1   University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Donostia – San Sebastian, Spain
,
Arantza Illarramendi
1   University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Donostia – San Sebastian, Spain
› Author Affiliations
Funding This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FEDER/ TIN2013–46238-C4–1-R and FEDER/ TIN2016–78011-C4–2-R).
Further Information

Publication History

received: 07 October 2017

accepted: 19 December 2017

Publication Date:
05 April 2018 (online)

Summary

Background: Single-Subject Design is used in several areas such as education and biomedicine. However, no suited formal vocabulary exists for annotating the detailed configuration and the results of this type of research studies with the appropriate granularity for looking for information about them. Therefore, the search for those study designs relies heavily on a syntactical search on the abstract, keywords or full text of the publications about the study, which entails some limitations.

Objective: To present SSDOnt, a specific purpose ontology for describing and annotating single-subject design studies, so that complex questions can be asked about them afterwards.

Methods: The ontology was developed following the NeOn methodology. Once the requirements of the ontology were defined, a formal model was described in a Description Logic and later implemented in the ontology language OWL 2 DL.

Results: We show how the ontology provides a reference model with a suitable terminology for the annotation and searching of single-subject design studies and their main components, such as the phases, the intervention types, the outcomes and the results. Some mappings with terms of related ontologies have been established. We show as proof-of-concept that classes in the ontology can be easily extended to annotate more precise information about specific interventions and outcomes such as those related to autism. Moreover, we provide examples of some types of queries that can be posed to the ontology.

Conclusions: SSDOnt has achieved the purpose of covering the descriptions of the domain of single-subject research studies.