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Developing a Physical Activity Ontology to Support the Interoperability of Physical Activity Data.
Hyeoneui Kim1, Jessica Mentzer1, Ricky Taira2
1School of Nursing, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States.
Journal of Medical Internet Research
|April 24, 2019
Summary
A new Physical Activity Ontology (PACO) standardizes diverse physical activity data, enabling better health insights. This ontology structures and classifies exercise habits for improved analysis and clinical relevance.
Area of Science:
- Biomedical Informatics
- Health Data Standardization
- Ontology Development
Background:
- Physical activity data is crucial for understanding disease but is inconsistently collected and presented.
- Heterogeneity in physical activity data hinders integrated analysis with clinical and microbiological data.
- Standardization is needed to unlock the full potential of physical activity data for improving human health.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a Physical Activity Ontology (PACO) for structuring and standardizing heterogeneous physical activity descriptions.
- To create a formal representation of physical activity concepts for improved data analysis.
- To support the integration of physical activity data with other health information.
Main Methods:
- A corpus of 1140 sentences from physical activity questionnaires and existing terminologies was compiled.
- Natural language processing (NLP) and Protégé software were used to extract and formalize physical activity concepts into the PACO ontology.
- PACO was evaluated for logical consistency and adherence to ontology best practices, with a use case demonstrating its application in classifying exercise habits.
Main Results:
- The Physical Activity Ontology (PACO) was constructed with 268 unique concepts and 225 classes.
- Ontology auditing confirmed PACO's structural and logical consistency, meeting most best practice principles.
- PACO successfully standardized and classified 36 exercise habit statements into 'sufficiently active' or 'insufficiently active' categories.
Conclusions:
- PACO represents a foundational step in standardizing physical activity descriptions for integrative health data analysis.
- The ontology is structurally consistent and adheres to established authoring principles.
- PACO demonstrates utility in standardizing diverse physical activity data and classifying it into clinically meaningful categories of exercise adequacy.
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