Strategies for referent tracking in electronic health records
Journal of Biomedical Informatics - Special issue: Biomedical ontologies
Introducing Realist Ontology for the Representation of Adverse Events
Proceedings of the 2008 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference (FOIS 2008)
Guest Editorial: Ontologies for clinical and translational research: Introduction
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
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A proper ontological treatment of intolerance-including hypersensitivity-to various substances is critical to patient care and research. However, existing methods and standards for documenting these conditions have flaws that inhibit these goals, especially translational research that bridges the two activities. In response, I outline a realist approach to the ontology of substance intolerance, including hypersensitivity conditions. I defend a view of these conditions as a subtype of disease. Specifically, a substance intolerance is a disease whose pathological process(es) are realized upon exposure to a quantity of substance of a particular type, and this quantity would normally not cause the realization of the pathological process(es). To develop this theory, it was necessary to build pieces of a theory of pathological processes. Overall, however, the framework of the Ontology for General Medical Science (which uses Basic Formal Ontology as its uppermost level) was a more-than-adequate foundation on which to build the theory.