Semantic models for environmental exposures: Linking geo and bio via the toxicology community

Semantic technology has the potential to advance research by acting as a bridge across bespoke standards. This has already been demonstrated through projects like the Monarch Initiative (Shefchek et al., 2020) and Phenoscape (Edmunds et al., 2015). Both of these projects are biologically-focused repositories for relating genes and phenotypes, but the environment plays an important role in the observable traits of organisms. To represent environmental exposures in the Monarch knowledge graph we created the Environmental Conditions,  Treatments, and Exposures Ontology (ECTO) and proposed a model for linking environments to diseases and phenotypes. Development of the ontology and the model was guided by biomedicine and toxicology, two user communities that have a keen interest in understanding the effect of elements of the environment on gene expression, observable phenotypes, and disease progression. This talk will present the semantic model and review the process for its development within the toxicology and biomedical communities.