Development of an Adolescent Depression Ontology for Analyzing Social Data

Depression in adolescence is associated with significant suicidality. Therefore, it is important to detect the risk for depression and provide timely care to adolescents. This study aims to develop an ontology for collecting and analyzing social media data about adolescent depression. This ontology was developed using the 'ontology development 101'. The important terms were extracted from several clinical practice guidelines and postings on Social Network Service. We extracted 777 terms, which were categorized into 'risk factors', 'sign and symptoms', 'screening', 'diagnosis', 'treatment', and 'prevention'. An ontology developed in this study can be used as a framework to understand adolescent depression using unstructured data from social media.