A semantic framework leveraging pattern-based ontology terms to bridge environmental exposures and health outcomes

Agricultural chemical use is a critical aspect of modern agriculture and residues of these chemicals

are commonly consumed by humans. These chemicals and other environmental exposures pose risk for

human health through a variety of mechanisms, prompting toxicological and public health research to

better understand their impacts. While extensive exposure research has been conducted and the data stored

in toxicological databases, the ability to computationally assess these findings in the larger context of

biomedical research to inform our knowledge for improved human health is still quite challenging.

We developed an integrative model of exposure events that utilizes content from the Open

Biological Ontologies to build a semantic framework of environmental exposures and health outcomes.

Logical axioms included within the Mondo Disease Ontology; the Food Ontology; and the Environmental

Conditions, Treatments, and Exposures Ontology (ECTO) all further enrich the proposed model. Further

development of exposure event component terms and related logical axioms can facilitate the

standardization needed for exposure modeling. Exposure content and our model can be utilized for the

development of integrative knowledge graphs of exposure-health data. Additionally, this model serves as a

resource to aid the integration of common exposure data sources such as self-reported survey tools.

Further work is needed to incorporate essential exposure data components into a comprehensive

model, such as estimated or known exposure values, temporality of exposures, and biologically active

exposure dosages that incur toxic effects.