i spy with my little eye

[surchs]

Title

I spy with my little eye: how to create a common vocabulary for assessment tools in a community

Short description and the goals for the OHBM BrainHack

The goal of this project is to adapt or develop a process that helps communities create a controlled vocabulary for assessment tools that are used in the community.

Short definitions here:

• an assessment
  • is a questionnaire, named form, cognitive or clinical assessment or battery of test, observational protocol
  • is not a cognitive task (n-back), experimental design or condition (medication on/off), biological or physical measure (height, blood pressure)
• a controlled vocabulary is a list of terms with definitions and unique identifiers (e.g. the ICD-11)
• a community is a group of people with data that agree to work together and could benefit from a shared language for their assessments (e.g. a research consortium, a data publishing platform, a group of collaborators, ...)

Assumptions:

• Most communities collect “assessment tools”, questionnaires, forms, clinical assessments, etc
• Within a community, agreeing on a well defined list of named assessments is good for interoperability, findability, etc
• There are many controlled FAIR vocabularies that include assessment tools
• Making a single controlled vocabulary of assessments that works for all communities is not feasible
• A community vocabulary of assessments should link to existing FAIR vocabularies so we may eventually integrate communities etc
• There are good tools / services out there that can help find terms in existing FAIR vocabularies (OLS, UMLS, ...) and we may reuse these

Goals

Adapt / create (a) process(es) that

• lets a community collect, curate, and maintain a list of assessments
• makes it easy for community members to propose new terms
• facilitates / requires new terms to link to terms in existing FAIR vocabularies
• makes the review of new submissions easy / manageable
• helps publish and maintain these lists in a format that is easily reusable

The link to Neurobagel here is very loose, but we help communities annotate their data with FAIR vocabularies - and the insufficient coverage of assessment tools is the main complaint we are getting. Eventually the goal would be to allow communities to create their lists and for Neurobagel to be able to read these lists for annotation and discovery.

Link to the Project

https://neurobagel.org/

Image/Logo for the OHBM brainhack website

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/neurobagel/annotation-tool/refs/heads/main/src/assets/logo.svg

Project lead

@surchs | _surchs

Main Hub

Brisbane

Link to the Project pitch

No response

Other hubs covered by the leaders

• Brisbane
• Hybrid (Asia / Pacific)
• Hybrid (Europe / Middle East / Africa)
• Hybrid (Americas)

Skills

This is not primarily a coding project. Looking for folks who have created or are creating such a list for their community and have thoughts on what it takes to make this easy (and fun?) to do. Also looking for folks who have experience with the technical side of creating/maintaing a system for term submissions and review (e.g. reproschema, cogatlas, etc)

• Some experience working with assessment tool naming in a community (e.g. figuring out how to integrate phenotypic files from a bunch of datasets, ...)
• Would like to have a standardized vocabulary for assessment tools in their community
• Some familiarity with FAIR vocabulaires / the need for data annotation
• Python: beginner (e.g. if we build some small services, can be taught / learned in the project)
• JavaScript: beginner (e.g. if we make a basic web thingee, can be taught / learned in the project)

Recommended tutorials for new contributors

• https://neurohackademy.org/course/the-fair-principles/

Good first issues

This is general idea of a roadmap, happy to change this

• Start with a rough survey of the tools that people use (we already have a long list)
• See how many of them we can find in FAIR resources like UMLS or OLS
• Define minimum criteria that should be fulfilled for a new term submission (e.g. name, abbreviation, DOI/identifier/ISBN, link to one/any/all existing controlled Terms, ...)
• Prototype (can be on paper / manual) a process that meets these needs
• Start thinking about putting the process into code / tools, understand how this can be reusable for different communities

Twitter summary

No response

Short name for the Discord chat channel (~15 chars)

assessment-vocab

Please read and follow the OHBM Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the OHBM Code of Conduct during the hackathon