iOntoBioethics: A Framework for the Agile Development of Bioethics Ontologies in Pandemics, Applied to COVID-19

Mohammed Odeh; Faten F Kharbat; Rana Yousef; Yousra Odeh; Dina Tbaishat; Nancy Hakooz; Rana Dajani; Asem Mansour

doi:10.3389/fmed.2021.619978

iOntoBioethics: A Framework for the Agile Development of Bioethics Ontologies in Pandemics, Applied to COVID-19

Front Med (Lausanne). 2021 May 21:8:619978. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2021.619978. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Mohammed Odeh^{1

2}, Faten F Kharbat³, Rana Yousef⁴, Yousra Odeh⁵, Dina Tbaishat⁶, Nancy Hakooz⁷, Rana Dajani^{8

9}, Asem Mansour¹

Affiliations

¹ Cancer Care Informatics Programme, King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC), Amman, Jordan.
² Faculty of Environment and Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom.
³ Software Engineering and Computer Science Department, College of Engineering, Al Ain University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
⁴ Computer Information Systems Department, King Abdullah II School for Information Technology (KASIT), The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan.
⁵ Software Engineering Department, Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), Applied Science Private University, Amman, Jordan.
⁶ Library and Information Science Department, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan.
⁷ Department of Biopharmaceutics and Clinical Pharmacy, School of Pharmacy, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan.
⁸ Department of Biology and Biotechnology, Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan.
⁹ Jepson School of Leadership, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, United States.

Abstract

Background: Few ontological attempts have been reported for conceptualizing the bioethics domain. In addition to limited scope representativeness and lack of robust methodological approaches in driving research design and evaluation of bioethics ontologies, no bioethics ontologies exist for pandemics and COVID-19. This research attempted to investigate whether studying the bioethics research literature, from the inception of bioethics research publications, facilitates developing highly agile, and representative computational bioethics ontology as a foundation for the automatic governance of bioethics processes in general and the COVID-19 pandemic in particular. Research Design: The iOntoBioethics agile research framework adopted the Design Science Research Methodology. Using systematic literature mapping, the search space resulted in 26,170 Scopus indexed bioethics articles, published since 1971. iOntoBioethics underwent two distinctive stages: (1) Manually Constructing Bioethics (MCB) ontology from selected bioethics sources, and (2) Automatically generating bioethics ontological topic models with all 26,170 sources and using special-purpose developed Text Mining and Machine-Learning (TM&ML) engine. Bioethics domain experts validated these ontologies, and further extended to construct and validate the Bioethics COVID-19 Pandemic Ontology. Results: Cross-validation of the MCB and TM&ML bioethics ontologies confirmed that the latter provided higher-level abstraction for bioethics entities with well-structured bioethics ontology class hierarchy compared to the MCB ontology. However, both bioethics ontologies were found to complement each other forming a highly comprehensive Bioethics Ontology with around 700 concepts and associations COVID-19 inclusive. Conclusion: The iOntoBioethics framework yielded the first agile, semi-automatically generated, literature-based, and domain experts validated General Bioethics and Bioethics Pandemic Ontologies Operable in COVID-19 context with readiness for automatic governance of bioethics processes. These ontologies will be regularly and semi-automatically enriched as iOntoBioethics is proposed as an open platform for scientific and healthcare communities, in their infancy COVID-19 learning stage. iOntoBioethics not only it contributes to better understanding of bioethics processes, but also serves as a bridge linking these processes to healthcare systems. Such big data analytics platform has the potential to automatically inform bioethics governance adherence given the plethora of developing bioethics and COVID-19 pandemic knowledge. Finally, iOntoBioethics contributes toward setting the first building block for forming the field of "Bioethics Informatics".

Keywords: COVID-19; agile framework; bioethics; bioethics informatics; bioethics ontology; design science research methodology; iOntoBioethics; pandemic.