Welcome!

Casual Pathway Ontology (CPO) is an application ontology about mechanisms that participate in digital health interventions. CPO is deliberately small to make it easier to manage and currently only imports Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). CPO is applied in a knowledgebase that is used to tailor performance communication to healthcare professionals. This work is not peer-reviewed. The terms and definitions are contextualized for health systems communication as an interpretation of:

Lewis CC, Klasnja P, Powell BJ, Lyon AR, Tuzzio L, Jones S, Walsh-Bailey C,Weiner B. From Classification to Causality: Advancing Understanding of Mechanisms of Change in Implementation Science. Front Public Health. 2018 May 7;6:136. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2018.00136. eCollection 2018. PubMed PMID: 29868544; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5949843.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

Research reported in this ontology was supported by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health under grant number 1K01LM012528-01.

Ontology Content

Current Ontology Terms and Definitions

The DICTIONARY represents all terms and definitions in the Casual Pathway Ontology that are not the result of imports from other ontologies. In order to ensure interoperability, please read the OBO Foundry Guidelines before contributing to term development.

Contributing to Term Development

All contributions to terms in the ontology should be documented in an issue. Examples of contributions are:

1. Requesting a change to a current term.
2. Proposing a new term.
3. Requesting removal of a current term.

Requesting a Change or Removal

1. Create a new issue for the change with a descriptive title.
2. Assign the label 'term' to the issue, along with any other labels necessary.
3. Provide a clear description regarding the change that should be addressed.
4. Provide a reference for the change.
5. If the change request requires action from someone specific assign the issue to that person.
6. Create the issue.

Proposing a New Term

1. Check the current dictionary to see if the term already exists.
2. Create a new issue for the new term with a descriptive title, i.e., 'New Term Need: domain problem'
3. Assign the label 'term' to the issue, along with any other labels necessary.
4. Collect required information for a new term in the body of the issue.
   • Term name
   • Definition
   • Comment
   • Reference (strongly encouraged)
5. Create the issue for the new term.

Development

Getting Started

1. Clone this repository
2. Download & install Protege
3. cd to project directory
4. Open Protege
5. Open cpo.owl
   1. Use File>Open... menu item
   2. Open owl file cpo.owl in project directory

Release & Publish Ontology Version

1. Run the command tools/cpo_release.sh and follow the prompts on the command line.

License

Ontology Content

The ontology content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Source Code

Copyright 2018 Regents of the University of Michigan

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.