Three-layered semantic framework for public health intelligence

Background: Disease surveillance systems play a crucial role in monitoring and preventing infectious diseases. However, the current landscape, primarily focused on fragmented health data, poses challenges to contextual understanding and decision-making. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a semantic framework using ontologies to provide a unified data representation for seamless integration. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach using a case study of a COVID-19 incident at a football game in Italy. Method: In this study, we undertook a comprehensive approach to gather and analyze data for the development of ontologies within the realm of pandemic intelligence. Multiple ontologies were meticulously crafted to cater to different domains related to pandemic intelligence, such as healthcare systems, mass gatherings, travel, and diseases. The ontologies were classified into top-level, domain, and application layers. This classification facilitated the development of a three-layered architecture, promoting reusability, and consistency in knowledge representation, and serving as the backbone of our semantic framework. Result: Through the utilization of our semantic framework, we accomplished semantic enrichment of both structured and unstructured data. The integration of data from diverse sources involved mapping to ontology concepts, leading to the creation and storage of RDF triples in the triple store. This process resulted in the construction of linked data, ultimately enhancing the discoverability and accessibility of valuable insights. Furthermore, our anomaly detection algorithm effectively leveraged knowledge graphs extracted from the triple store, employing semantic relationships to discern patterns and anomalies within the data. Notably, this capability was exemplified by the identification of correlations between a football game and a COVID-19 event occurring at the same location and time. Conclusion: The framework showcased its capability to address intricate, multi-domain queries and support diverse levels of detail. Additionally, it demonstrated proficiency in data analysis and visualization, generating graphs that depict patterns and trends; however, challenges related to ontology maintenance, alignment, and mapping must be addressed for the approach’s optimal utilization.