Request for new ontology [CMEO]

[komi786]

Title

Clinical Metadata Exploration Ontology

Short Description

CMEO (Clinical Metadata Exploration Ontology) is a semantic model for representing and querying clinical cohort study metadata to enable cross-study discovery and metadata-driven harmonization.

Description

CMEO provides a standardized, machine-interpretable representation of clinical cohort metadata at study and data-element (variable) level.
It captures variable meaning and key metadata such as units, categorical value sets, visit/timepoint context, data/statistical types, and derivation/provenance. CMEO supports linking metadata to controlled vocabularies and concept identifiers. It enables SPARQL-based study retrieval, feasibility assessment, and identification of compatible variables across cohorts without accessing patient-level data.
CMEO is designed to be model-agnostic and interoperable, serving as a foundation for privacy-preserving cohort alignment workflows.

Identifier Space

cmeo

License

CC-BY 4.0

Domain

health

Source Code Repository

https://github.com/komi786/cmeo

Homepage

https://komi786.github.io/cmeo/

Issue Tracker

https://github.com/komi786/cmeo/issues

Contribution Guidelines

https://github.com/komi786/cmeo/blob/main/contribution.md

Ontology Download Link

https://github.com/komi786/cmeo/blob/main/cmeo-core.owl

Contact Name

Komal Gilani

Contact Email

komalsyeda29@gmail.com

Contact GitHub Username

komi786

Contact ORCID Identifier

0000-0001-7292-1026

Formats

• OWL RDF/XML (.owl)
• OBO (.obo)
• OBO Graph JSON (.json)

Dependencies

BFO
OBI

Related

DUO
SIO
OBCS
STATO

Usages

Intended Use Cases and/or Related Projects

The ontology has been used to semantically align clinical studies on metadata-level (Article Published: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12911-025-03272-5). It is developed as part of project ICARE4CVD: https://icare4cvd.eu/

Data Sources

literature and interview with expert especially clinicans and data scentists

Additional comments or remarks

No response

OBO Foundry Pre-registration Checklist

• I have read and understood the registration process instructions and the registration checklist.
• There is no other ontology in the OBO Foundry which would be an appropriate place for my terms. If there were, I have contacted the editors, and we decided in mutual agreement that a separate ontology is more appropriate.
• My ontology has a specific release file with a version IRI and a dc:license annotation, serialised in RDF/XML.
• My identifiers (classes and properties IRIs) are formatted according to the OBO Foundry Identifier Policy
• My term labels are in English and conform to the OBO Foundry Naming Conventions
• I understand that term definitions are key to understanding the intentions of a term, especially when the ontology is used in curation. I made sure that a reasonable majority of terms in my ontology--and all top level terms--have definitions, in English, using the IAO:0000115 property.
• For every term in my ontology, I checked whether another OBO Foundry ontology has one with the same meaning. If so, I re-used that term directly (not by cross-reference, by directly using the IRI).
• For all relationship properties (Object and Data Property), I checked whether the Relation Ontology (RO) includes an appropriate one. I understand that aligning with RO is an essential part of the overall alignment between OBO ontologies!
• For the selection of appropriate annotation properties, I looked at OMO first. I understand that aligning ontology metadata and term-level metadata is essential for cross-integration of OBO ontologies.
• If I was not sure about the meaning of any of the checkboxes above, I have consulted with a member of the OBO Foundry for advice, e.g., through the obo-discuss Google Group.
• The requested ID space does not conflict with another ID space found in other registries such as the Bioregistry and BioPortal, see here for a complete list.

[pfabry]

Dear @komi786,

Thank you for your submission. The review will be executed as a two stage process:

First, you will have to pass OBO NOR Dashboard. Pass means that no check apart from Users and Versioning may be red. In addition, a new check is currently implemented: it consists in a lexical match of your original terms with those already existing in OBO Foundry published ontologies. The goal is to prevent the duplication of terms with similar meanings (cf. Review SOP). A list of terms that are potential duplicates will be provided soon.

After you have successfully passed the Dashboard you will be assigned an OBO Operations committee member to review the ontology. The assigned reviewer is to be considered the final arbiter of requirements; look to that reviewer's guidance regarding which suggestions made by other reviewers must be done, which suggestions are simply good to do but not required, and which should not be done.

Usually, the review will result in an opportunity for you to improve the ontology. When the reviewer believes the ontology is ready for presentation to the OBO Operations Committee, they will present your ontology during an OBO Operations Call. This gives other members of the committee the opportunity to assess your work.

When a decision is reached by the committee you will be informed here on the issue tracker. The process can take any number of weeks or months, depending on the case at hand.
Please let us know about any reasons you might have for increased urgency.

You will be informed once your ontology is loaded in the OBO NOR Dashboard.

Good luck!

[pfabry]

Dear @komi786,

Your ontology is available on the OBO NOR dashboard. The dashboard has highlighted several issues:

• The ontology does not use the standard URIs of OBO Foundry ontologies: OBO Foundry Principle 3
• The ontology does not provide definitions for its original classes: OBO Foundry Principle 6

Would it be possible for you to address them in order to proceed further?

[komi786]

@pfabry thanks for notifying. I am happy to address the comments. I will get back after making changes.