Advancing Prevention Research in Cancer through Ontology Tools
Overview
Changing behaviour at scale is needed to address the major challenges facing humanity: from preventing and treating disease to tackling the climate crisis. Developing effective interventions to achieve this requires effective and efficient generation and use of scientific evidence. The Human Behaviour-Change Project has developed an extensive ontology of behaviour change interventions, their contexts and mechanisms of action to organise global evidence about behaviour change and predict intervention outcomes in novel behaviour change scenarios. The APRICOT (Advancing Prevention Research In Cancer through Ontology Tools) project extends this work by developing (i) ontologies covering health-related behaviours, (ii) a Community of Practice for ontologies in the social and behavioural sciences, and (iii) tools and resources to make ontologies more useable and useful. This will include developing methods, to apply and integrate ontologies with real-world data related to the social and environmental determinants of health and inequalities, and to facilitate their uptake in behavioural science practice.
Methods used
- Literature review and annotation
- Creating a community of practice for stakeholder involvement and feedback
- Developing and evaluating tools and resources to make ontologies more accessible and useable
Sample results/Publication
The APRICOT builds strongly on the Human Behaviour Change Project. More information on both the Human Behaviour Change Project and APRICOT can be found here, including a list of publications: https://www.humanbehaviourchange.org/
The upper level of the ontology looks like this:
A protocol paper for this will be published shortly.
