title: Developing VISO: Vaccine Information Statement Ontology for patient education.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To construct a comprehensive vaccine information ontology that can support personal health information applications using patient-consumer lexicon, and lead to outcomes that can improve patient education.
  
  
  METHODS
  The authors composed the Vaccine Information Statement Ontology (VISO) using the web ontology language (OWL). We started with 6 Vaccine Information Statement (VIS) documents collected from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website. Important and relevant selections from the documents were recorded, and knowledge triples were derived. Based on the collection of knowledge triples, the meta-level formalization of the vaccine information domain was developed. Relevant instances and their relationships were created to represent vaccine domain knowledge.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The initial iteration of the VISO was realized, based on the 6 Vaccine Information Statements and coded into OWL2 with Protégé. The ontology consisted of 132 concepts (classes and subclasses) with 33 types of relationships between the concepts. The total number of instances from classes totaled at 460, along with 429 knowledge triples in total. Semiotic-based metric scoring was applied to evaluate quality of the ontology.
authors.affiliation: School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center, 7000 Fannin St, Houston, 77030 TX USA.
authors.forename: Muhammad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Amith
authors.affiliation: School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center, 7000 Fannin St, Houston, 77030 TX USA.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Gong
authors.affiliation: Immunization Project, Texas Children's Hospital, 1102 Bates, Houston, 77030 TX USA.
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cunningham
authors.affiliation: Immunization Project, Texas Children's Hospital, 1102 Bates, Houston, 77030 TX USA.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Boom
authors.affiliation: School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center, 7000 Fannin St, Houston, 77030 TX USA.
authors.forename: Cui
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Tao
keywords: Biomedical informatics; Knowledge based systems; Ontology; Ontology construction; Vaccine Information Statements; Vaccines