Triangulating evidence in health sciences with Annotated Semantic Queries

Yi Liu*, Tom Gaunt*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

Abstract

Motivation:
Integrating information from data sources representing different study designs has the potential to strengthen evidence in population health research. However, this concept of evidence “triangulation” presents a number of challenges for systematically identifying and integrating relevant information. These include the harmonization of heterogenous evidence with common semantic concepts and properties, as well as the priortization of the retrieved evidence for triangulation with the question of interest.

Results:
We present Annotated Semantic Queries (ASQ), a natural language query interface to the integrated biomedical entities and epidemiological evidence in EpiGraphDB, which enables users to extract “claims” from a piece of unstructured text, and then investigate the evidence that could either support, contradict the claims, or offer additional information to the query. This approach has the potential to support the rapid review of preprints, grant applications, conference abstracts, and articles submitted for peer review. ASQ implements strategies to harmonize biomedical entities in different taxonomies and evidence from different sources, to facilitate evidence triangulation and interpretation.

Availability and implementation:
ASQ is openly available at https://asq.epigraphdb.org and its source code is available at https://github.com/mrcieu/epigraphdb-asq under GPL-3.0 license.
Original languageEnglish
Article numberbtae519
Number of pages13
JournalBioinformatics
Volume40
Issue number9
Early online date22 Aug 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.

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