McKone Thomas E, Feng Lydia
University of California, School of Public Health, Berkeley, CA, USA.
University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Risk Anal. 2015 Nov;35(11):2087-101. doi: 10.1111/risa.12414. Epub 2015 May 15.
Over the last decade the health and environmental research communities have made significant progress in collecting and improving access to genomic, toxicology, exposure, health, and disease data useful to health risk assessment. One of the barriers to applying these growing volumes of information in fields such as risk assessment is the lack of informatics tools to organize, curate, and evaluate thousands of journal publications and hundreds of databases to provide new insights on relationships among exposure, hazard, and disease burden. Many fields are developing ontologies as a way of organizing and analyzing large amounts of complex information from multiple scientific disciplines. Ontologies include a vocabulary of terms and concepts with defined logical relationships to each other. Building from the recently published exposure ontology and other relevant health and environmental ontologies, this article proposes an ontology for health risk assessment (RsO) that provides a structural framework for organizing risk assessment information and methods. The RsO is anchored by eight major concepts that were either identified by exploratory curations of the risk literature or the exposure-ontology working group as key for describing the risk assessment domain. These concepts are: (1) stressor, (2) receptor, (3) outcome, (4) exposure event, (5) dose-response approach, (6) dose-response metric, (7) uncertainty, and (8) measure of risk. We illustrate the utility of these concepts for the RsO with example curations of published risk assessments for ionizing radiation, arsenic in drinking water, and persistent pollutants in salmon.
在过去十年中，健康与环境研究领域在收集和改善获取对健康风险评估有用的基因组学、毒理学、暴露、健康和疾病数据方面取得了重大进展。在风险评估等领域应用这些日益增多的信息的障碍之一是缺乏信息学工具来组织、管理和评估数千篇期刊出版物和数百个数据库，以提供关于暴露、危害和疾病负担之间关系的新见解。许多领域正在开发本体作为组织和分析来自多个科学学科的大量复杂信息的一种方式。本体包括相互之间具有定义逻辑关系的术语和概念词汇表。本文基于最近发布的暴露本体以及其他相关的健康和环境本体，提出了一种健康风险评估本体（RsO），它为组织风险评估信息和方法提供了一个结构框架。RsO由八个主要概念支撑，这些概念要么是通过对风险文献的探索性管理确定的，要么是由暴露本体工作组确定为描述风险评估领域的关键概念。这些概念是：（1）应激源，（2）受体，（3）结果，（4）暴露事件，（5）剂量反应方法，（6）剂量反应指标，（7）不确定性，以及（8）风险度量。我们通过对电离辐射、饮用水中的砷和鲑鱼体内持久性污染物的已发表风险评估的示例管理来说明这些概念对RsO的效用。
