BSO-AD: An Ontology for Representing and Harmonizing Behavioral Social Knowledge in ADRD

Behavioral and social factors (BSFs) substantially influence the risk, onset, and progression of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), yet BSF-related knowledge remains scattered across heterogeneous sources, posing critical challenges for data harmonization and evidence synthesis. To address this gap, we present the Behavioral Social Data and Knowledge Ontology for ADRD (BSO-AD), a FAIR-compliant semantic resource for representing and harmonizing BSFs and ADRD-related knowledge. BSO-AD was developed following established ontology design principles with reuse of existing ontologies and controlled terminologies, including the Social Determinants of Health Ontology, Drug Repurposing-Oriented Alzheimer's Disease Ontology, AD-Onto, ICD-9-CM, and ICD-10-CM. Relationships between BSFs and ADRD were derived through literature mining. BSO-AD contains 1,690 classes, 152 object properties, 49 data properties, and 40 annotation properties. Ontology evaluation through Hootation-based domain expert review and a scalable LLM-assisted ontology assessment framework demonstrated high domain coverage and strong semantic coherence. BSO-AD provides a semantic foundation for data harmonization and knowledge integration in BSF-related ADRD research, while the LLM-assisted evaluation framework supports scalable and automated ontology assessment.