BSO-AD: An Ontology for Representing and Harmonizing Behavioral Social Knowledge in ADRD
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Behavioral and social factors (BSFs) substantially influence the risk, onset, and progression of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), yet BSF-related knowledge remains scattered across heterogeneous sources, posing critical challenges for data harmonization and evidence synthesis. To address this gap, we present the B ehavioral S ocial Data and Knowledge O ntology for AD RD (BSO-AD), a FAIR-compliant semantic resource for representing and harmonizing BSFs and ADRD-related knowledge. BSO-AD was developed following established ontology design principles with reuse of existing ontologies and controlled terminologies, including the Social Determinants of Health Ontology, Drug Repurposing-Oriented Alzheimer’s Disease Ontology, AD-Onto, ICD-9-CM, and ICD-10-CM. Relationships between BSFs and ADRD were derived through literature mining. BSO-AD contains 1,690 classes, 152 object properties, 49 data properties, and 40 annotation properties. Ontology evaluation through Hootation-based domain expert review and a scalable LLM-assisted ontology assessment framework demonstrated high domain coverage and strong semantic coherence. BSO-AD provides a semantic foundation for data harmonization and knowledge integration in BSF-related ADRD research, while the LLM-assisted evaluation framework supports scalable and automated ontology assessment.
