Summary
Background: Single-Subject Design is used in several areas such as education and biomedicine.
However, no suited formal vocabulary exists for annotating the detailed configuration
and the results of this type of research studies with the appropriate granularity
for looking for information about them. Therefore, the search for those study designs
relies heavily on a syntactical search on the abstract, keywords or full text of the
publications about the study, which entails some limitations.
Objective: To present SSDOnt, a specific purpose ontology for describing and annotating single-subject
design studies, so that complex questions can be asked about them afterwards.
Methods: The ontology was developed following the NeOn methodology. Once the requirements
of the ontology were defined, a formal model was described in a Description Logic
and later implemented in the ontology language OWL 2 DL.
Results: We show how the ontology provides a reference model with a suitable terminology for
the annotation and searching of single-subject design studies and their main components,
such as the phases, the intervention types, the outcomes and the results. Some mappings
with terms of related ontologies have been established. We show as proof-of-concept
that classes in the ontology can be easily extended to annotate more precise information
about specific interventions and outcomes such as those related to autism. Moreover,
we provide examples of some types of queries that can be posed to the ontology.
Conclusions: SSDOnt has achieved the purpose of covering the descriptions of the domain of single-subject
research studies.
Keywords
Single-subject research - ontology
