Ontology Alignment for Linking a Homegrown Research Networking System to VIVO: Findings and Implications for Standards Development

Young Ji Lee, RN, MS1, Mary Regina Boland, MA2, Suzanne Bakken, RN, PhD1,2,3, Chunhua Weng, PhD2,3 1School of Nursing, 2Department of Biomedical Informatics, 3The Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032

Aims
Aims of the study are 1) to evaluate VIVO to meet a set of formal ontological principles, 2) to assess the feasibility for pre-VIVO research networking systems (RNSs) to adopt and transition to VIVO and 3) to assess the popularity of different modeling decisions.

Results
CUSP: 8 classes/21 attributes, VIVO: 228 classes/213 attributes and ResearchGate: 7 classes/28 attributes CUSP, VIVO, ResarchGate share 3 classes and 10 attributes VIVO violated three primary ontological design principles

Introduction
VIVO ontology Recommended as the standard ontology for developing open RNSs by the CTSA strategic goal committee in 2011 Defines profiles of researchers including events, courses, facilities, person contact, publications, grants, etc. Able to localize information at an institutional level Columbia University Scientist Profiles (CUSP) Columbia University began developing its own RNS, CUSP, since 2006 (http://irvinginstitute.columbia.edu/cusp)1 Need to remodel CUSP to be interoperable with VIVO instead of creating a new instance of VIVO from scratch ResearchGate A popular, open-source social networking tool for researchers (http://www.researchgate.net) Used as a comparison reference to assess the popularity of different modeling decisions
Figure 1. Classes in VIVO Figure 2. A CUSP screenshot

Conclusions
VIVO allows the research community to discover resources and find potential collaborators across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. We contribute an understanding of the modeling differences between VIVO and other RNSs with a goal to inform the continuous improvement of VIVO through a collaborative approach

CUSP
Class: Organizations Attribute: has contact information Attribute: has personnel Attribute: has specification (department, center, initiative) Attribute: has grants

VIVO
Class: Organization Attribute: (primary email, mailing address, webpage) Attribute: has current member Has sub organization (department and center are also subclasses) Attribute: administers

ResearchGate
Class: Institution

Areas for Further Study

The study aligned only three RNS ontologies. Other RNSs may have varying similarities with VIVO. Our methodology can be reused and generalized to align other RNSs with VIVO when interested CTSA sites try to make their RNS VIVOcompliant.

Attribute: has department

Acknowledgments
Attribute: year Attribute: location

Method
1. Two authors (YL, MB) manually aligned the classes and attributes among CUSP, VIVO, and ResearchGate. Identified classes and attributes with the same meaning shared by the models Identified classes and attributes unique to one of the models and describe their uses and rationale Analyzed the structural or semantic differences for the classes and attributes unique to only one model 2. Used Noys ontology development guideline to examine the appropriateness of the modeling decisions made in the VIVO ontology2

Table 1. Matched classes and attributes between CUSP, VIVO and ResearchGate

CTSA grant UL1 TR000040, formerly the NCRR Grant Number UL1 RR024156 AHRQ grant R01 HS019853-01, Washington Heights/Inwood Informatics Infrastructure for Community-Centered Comparative Effectiveness Research (WICER)

Violated Ontology Design Principle

All the siblings in the hierarchy must be at the same level of generality. If there are more than a dozen subclasses for a given class then additional intermediate categories may be necessary The ontology should not contain all the possible properties of and distinctions among classes in the hierarchy

Examples that Violate the Rule

EmeritusFaculty subsumes EmeritusProfessor, but the two were placed at the same level of the class hierarchy Class Role has 12 subclasses that do not meet the disjointness criterion: Attendee, Clinical, Editor, Leader, Member, Organizer, OutreachProvider, Presenter, Researcher, Reviewer, ServiceProvider, Teacher DateTimeInterval, DateTimeValue, and DateTimeValuePrecision

References
1. Boland MR, Trembowelski S, Bakken S, Weng C. An initial log analysis of usage patterns on a research networking system. Clin Transl Sci. Aug 2012;5(4):340-347. 2. Noy N, McGuinness D. Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology. Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory Technical Report KSL-01-05 and Stanford Medical Informatics Technical Report SMI-2001-0880 2001.

Table 2. Selected Violated Ontological Design Principles and Examples