Introduction to the II Ontology
1. Introduction
This ontology provides terminology for illnesses and injuries to describe health problems or causes of death in the context of historical or cultural analysis where specific information is often unavailable. It is an abbreviated version of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Startup Mortality List (ICD-10-SMoL), the WHO's simplified application of ICD-10. It was developed to add structure to the designations for cause of death and health problems represented in biographical information. This ontology was developed because the terminology used to describe causes of death have changed over time as medical diagnosis and classification has become more scientific, standardized, and complex. It endeavours to address the changes in medical knowledge and terminology between the time covered by the collection and the modern era.
This document is a human-readable version of the ontology that cannot document all of its data structures. The ontology itself should be the primary source for understanding how the ontology works.
The intended audience of this document are scholars who wishes to understand how the ontology tackles concrete data recording problems and linked open data practitioners who intend to make use of this ontology.
2. Background
ICD-10-SMoL was chosen because it is a simplified version of the ICD-10. ICD (International Classification of Diseases) "is the foundation for the identification of health trends and statistics globally, and the international standard for reporting diseases and health conditions. It is the diagnostic classification standard for all clinical and research purposes. ICD defines the universe of diseases, disorders, injuries and other related health conditions" Source.
Version 1.0 of this ontology was compiled for the CWRC ontology project and reflects the need to have causes of death and health issues organized in a way to allow for analysis of cultural data. A simplified list was deemed sufficient since the domain under study (cultural documents) will not have detailed medical information with regards to cause of death or health issues. But instead of accepting a list of general usage terms for causes of death or health issues that appear in some sources (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikidata, etc.), a standardized, medical classification was selected so that it could be of use for future analysis regarding questions involving the intersection of health and culture.
ICD-10-SMoL was chosen since it was the latest version of this list (June, 2018) at the time of ontology creation. ICD-11 is now the latest version of the ICD but as of February, 2025 there is no ICD-11-SMoL available.
3. Basic ontological goals
a. Goals
The basic goal of this ontology is to provide an ontology that expresses the current, modern view of illnesses and injuries while still being accessible to the non-medical user. The premiere classification of illnesses and injuries leading to death is the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The ICD has gone through many versions with ICD-11 being the most recent but the ICD-10 has had the most impact and is the basis for other classification strategies and systems. It was not appropriate to use the ICD system since it was meant for medical professionals and is too complex for the purposes of classifying cause of death in cultural documents. An abbreviated list of illnesses and injuries is the Start-Up Mortality List (SMoL) that was developed for low resource settings. Even this list is not quite appropriate for our task so it was used as the basis for a novel ontology that has been called the Illness and Injury ontology.
The basic “chapters” or divisions of the ICD-10-SMoL have been used to provide the top level classes in the ontology and under each class, individuals that represent various illnesses and injuries. The classes were selected to be sufficient to cover the range of causes of death seen in a survey of Orlando data. The individuals were also selected to be sufficient for the cause of death task and not to be a complete set of all illnesses and injuries in the ICD-10-SMoL.
The language of the labels for classes and individuals is a reflection of modern medical terminology, e.g. Tuberculosis and not Consumption. Older historical terms have been added to the ontology as skos:altLabel where appropriate. Some of these alternate labels were taken from a glossary of medical terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries from “The History of Medicine and Public Health: A Miscellany Concentrating on the 18th and 19th centuries with material of interest to North West England” by Craig Thornber.
b. Data sources
- International Classification of Diseases
- [Home Page for ICD-11]https://www.who.int/standards/classifications/classification-of-diseases
- [ICD 10 Browser]https://icd.who.int/browse10/2019/en
- ICD-10-SMoL
- Glossary of Medical Terms Used in the 18th and 19th Centuries, from “The History of Medicine and Public Health: A Miscellany Concentrating on the 18th and 19th centuries with material of interest to North West England” by Craig Thornber.
4. Notes on SKOS and OWL
The W3C SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) is widely used for semantic web data. It provides structured taxonomies in RDF without requiring reasoner support. SKOS terms are used within this ontology to link terms to each other. However, such links lack the expressiveness enabled by OWL relationships. OWL is the preferred means of using this ontology. However, SKOS terms have been used where possible to enable to support its use as a SKOS vocabulary.
A parallel SKOS I&I vocabular is available through the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS).
5. Current State and Collaboration
This document and the associated ontology will grow iteratively with modifications made over time as data is progressively translated and further ontological concerns are identified. Continuity is ensured using the OWL ontology annotations for ontological compatibility and for deprecated classes and properties. Deprecated ontology terms remain present but are marked as such.
The dynamic ontology is understood to be a living document that makes no claims to completeness. Instances in particular have been derived from particular datasets and will be expanded progressively over time.
We welcome suggestions for new classes, properties, and predicates from those wishing to use the ontology for their own datasets, as well as suggestions related to the complexity of vocabularies associated with existing terms. Please submit suggestions via an issue or a pull request to the CWRC Ontology code repository.
6. Version History
- 1.0 - Initial public release. Most of the terms from ICD-10 and SMoL that were deemed appropriate appear in this version but changes to these terms (additions, deletions, modifications) may occur in the future. A new class (Women's Health) appears but is not populated with instances yet. This was added in anticipation of the needs for documenting health issues as opposed to cause of death.