Semantic approach to Bioethics in the Ethicsweb European Project Building a semantic architecture...

Semantic approach to Bioethics in the Ethicsweb European ProjectBuilding a semantic architecture for a European Ethics documentation system.Corrado Di Benedetto, Luisa Leone

Maurella Della SetaIstituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy

ISKO 2010 ConferenceParadigms and conceptual systems in KO

Rome, February 23-26, 2010

ISKO 2010 Conference 2

Bioethics-related information

Scattered through a variety of sources Interdisciplinary nature, affecting science, law

and philosophy Retrieving and disseminating exhaustive

bioethical documentation is essential to ensure a continuous updating

Increasing demand for updated and reliable information


European Project Ethicsweb

Funded under the 7th Framework Program (FP7) of the European Commission

Started in June 2008 and including 17 partners

Aimed at developing a common European reference focal point for information

Special emphasis is placed on the semantic approach


EthicsWeb Purposes

Create a European information system on ethics and science

Set up the infrastructure for an advanced systematic documentation, information and communication tool

Collect different kinds of documentation like literature, laws, regulations and guidelines, training materials and training programmes, academic exchange programmes, centres, projects and experts, events and news


What is the Ethicsweb Portal? www.ethicsweb.org A comprehensive and user-friendly

information portal for integrating the existing databases in the field of ethics and science

It is a common gateway to distributed information resources within the field of ethics and science

Through the portal it is possible to search across data deriving from several data producers


Work Package 4(Semantics Exchange schemas - Content Management - Thesauri and Ontologies)The WP4 has the mission to: Collect different Ethics Knowledge

Organization Systems (KOS) Release a prototype registry of KOS in Ethics Release semantic standards for different types

of databases. Linking already existing databases and portals


Deliverables of Work Package 4 (1) Registry of Knowledge Organisation Systems Prototype version has been implemented Collecting semantic tools (thesauri, controlled

vocabularies, ontologies) in the field of bioethics


Controlled Vocabularies in Ethics and Science

TELS

Thesaurus Ethics in the Life Sciences

TIB

Italian Bioethics

Thesaurus

Others

LCSH

Agrovoc….

MESH

Ethics descriptors


Thesaurus Ethics in the Life Sciences Result of a joint project including several partners: DRZE (editor in

chief), Bonn; Centre de documentation en éthique - CCNE/Inserm, Paris; Information and Documentation Centre for Ethics in Medicine (IDEM), Göttingen; Interdepartmental Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities, IZEW, Tubingen; Kennedy Institute of Ethics (KIE)

First integrated, multilingual, controlled indexing and research tool

Designed to include new fields of bioethics, treated either marginally or not at all

Adequate coverage of current developments in bioethics – a field of science characterised by heterogeneity and multidisciplinarity – in the international context.


Subject Areas of TELS


The Italian Bioethics Theasurus (TIB) Developed by Istituto Superiore di Sanita (ISS) to

facilitate indexing and access to documentation in SIBIL database www.iss.it/sibi

Links terms both hierarchically and by association to restrict or expand the search field

Shows synonyms and other words similar to the search term to allow multiple access to the same concept

Regularly revised and updated to keep pace with the development of Bioethics in the Italian debate

Supported by an online manual, can be accessed through the database and is available in Italian and English.


TIB Italian-English version (2009)


National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is the controlled vocabulary used for indexing articles for the MEDLINE® subset of PubMed

PubMed subset Bioethics Italian Translation of MeSH www.iss.it/site/mesh

Medical Subject Headings


A selection of Ethics related MeSH descriptors

Ethics

Bioethical Issues Bioethics Ethics, Clinical Codes of Ethics Helsinki Declaration Hippocratic Oath Complicity Conflict of Interest Ethical Analysis Casuistry Retrospective Moral Judgment Wedge Argument Ethical Relativism Ethical Review Ethics Consultation Ethical Theory Ethicists Ethics, Business Ethics Committees Ethics Committees, Clinical Ethics Committees, Research Ethics, Institutional Ethics, Professional Ethics, Clinical Ethics, Research Therapeutic Equipoise Therapeutic Misconception Humanism Feminism Morals Conscience Moral Development Social Responsibility Virtues Personhood Principle-Based Ethics Beneficence Personal Autonomy Social Justice Professional Misconduct Scientific Misconduct Complicity Double Effect Principle


Deliverables of Work Package 4 (2) Release of standards for sharing information

on Documents, News and events, Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS), Learning resources, Experts, and Projects.

Development of application profiles (AP) (i.e. set of metadata elements, policies, and guidelines defined for a particular application) as a mean of data exchange, in order to achieve interoperability among existing realities


Application Profile

The application profile is a schema which consists of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined together by implementors, and optimised for a particular local application

Heery R. and Patel M., Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas, Ariadne (25) September 2000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/


The EthicsWeb Application Profile (AP) For each AP an element set is developed,

which include: the elements themselves (e.g. title, creator, publisher); the element refinement(s) (e.g. for the element “publisher”: publisherName, publisherPlace, publisherContact); encoding schemes (e.g. for KOS: MeSH, LCSH etc.); requirement (Mandatory, Mandatory if Available, Optional); occurrence (Repeatable, Non-repeatable).


The metadata elements used for EthicsWeb Application Profiles Dublin Core (DC) http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/ AGRIS http://aims.fao.org/website/The-AGRIS-AP/

AGLS http://www.agls.gov.au/schemas/xmls/

Friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/

Learning Object Metadata (LOM) http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/

RSS 2.0 http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html

Accessible Information on Development Activities (AiDA) http://aida.developmentgateway.org/


Integration at the Technical Level- XML based schemas The metadata elements of the EthicsWeb

APs correspond to XML elements of the EthicsWeb XML schemas

Each schema defines the XML element of the exchange format for the corresponding object type

The exchange format is the common denominator of data deriving from different sources


Logical structure of the XML Schema (1)


Logical structure of the XML Schema (2)


Example of XML Metadata (1)


Example of XML Metadata (2)


Ethicsweb Architecture


OAI-PMH Open Access Initiative -Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Is a protocol for automatically collecting data

from a provider site The provider site needs to have an OAI-PMH

module installed and configured to accept remote calls frome the EthicsWeb Portal

The Portal collects data via OAI-PMH at regular intervals

Data should conform to the EthicsWeb XML schemas


Integrating data with EthicsWeb Successful trials were already made in order to

merge data from different databases in the field of bioethics

PubMed www.pubmed.gov (Bioethics Subset) Belit database www.drze.de/BELIT?la=en The Ethicsweb application profile and the XML

scheme for Document-LIke Objects were successfully used

Bibliographic data from other databases, such as SIBIL (Sistema Informativo per la Bioetica In Linea), developed and maintained by the ISS www.iss.it/sibi will be soon implemented as well.

Semantic approach to Bioethics in the Ethicsweb European Project Building a semantic architecture...

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