Using the EC decision on case definitions for communicable diseases as a terminology source--lessons learned

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Infectious Disease Epidemiology
• Knowledge Engineering

Background:

• The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) faces challenges in maintaining transparency and consistency across its information systems.
• Semantic interoperability is crucial for effective data exchange and relies on the Terminology Server (TS) and its structured value sets.
• EU public health regulations contain valuable, yet complex, terminology for disease reporting.

Purpose of the Study:

• To extract and formalize scientific terminology from EU public health regulations for improved data consistency.
• To enhance the ECDC's Terminology Server (TS) value sets with accurate and structured public health data.
• To identify areas for improvement in legal texts to ensure more precise epidemiologic data collection.

Main Methods:

• Information extraction from an EC Implementing Decision on case definitions for 53 notifiable infectious diseases.
• Consistency checks, abstraction, and representation of laboratory criteria in a structured triplet format (result/organism-substance/specimen).
• Identification of negations and enrichment of existing TS value sets (diseases, organisms, public health terms).

Main Results:

• A new case definition value set was created, formalizing criteria and extending the disease value set with new signs and symptoms.
• The organism value set was enriched, and new categories like transmission modes, substances, specimens, and procedures were added to the public health value set.
• Several problem areas were identified, including classification errors, inconsistent granularity, potential logical and factual errors, and phrasing issues.

Conclusions:

• The hypothesis that improvements are possible in the legal text for more precise epidemiologic data collection is supported.
• Formal representation for automatic case classification was outside the scope of this study.
• Further refinement of legal texts is recommended to enhance the accuracy and consistency of public health data collection.