An Innovative Approach to Addressing Childhood Obesity: A Knowledge-Based Infrastructure for Supporting Multi-Stakeholder Partnership Decision-Making in Quebec, Canada

Abstract

Multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) have become a widespread means for deploying policies in a whole of society strategy to address the complex problem of childhood obesity. However, decision-making in MSPs is fraught with challenges, as decision-makers are faced with complexity, and have to reconcile disparate conceptualizations of knowledge across multiple sectors with diverse sets of indicators and data. These challenges can be addressed by supporting MSPs with innovative tools for obtaining, organizing and using data to inform decision-making. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the development of a knowledge-based infrastructure to support MSP decision-making processes. The paper emerged from a study to define specifications for a knowledge-based infrastructure to provide decision support for community-level MSPs in the Canadian province of Quebec. As part of the study, a process assessment was conducted to understand the needs of communities as they collect, organize, and analyze data to make decisions about their priorities. The result of this process is a “portrait”, which is an epidemiological profile of health and nutrition in their community. Portraits inform strategic planning and development of interventions, and are used to assess the impact of interventions. Our key findings indicate ambiguities and disagreement among MSP decision-makers regarding causal relationships between actions and outcomes, and the relevant data needed for making decisions. MSP decision-makers expressed a desire for easy-to-use tools that facilitate the collection, organization, synthesis, and analysis of data, to enable decision-making in a timely manner. Findings inform conceptual modeling and ontological analysis to capture the domain knowledge and specify relationships between actions and outcomes. This modeling and analysis provide the foundation for an ontology, encoded using OWL 2 Web Ontology Language. The ontology is developed to provide semantic support for the MSP process, defining objectives, strategies, actions, indicators, and data sources. In the future, software interacting with the ontology can facilitate interactive browsing by decision-makers in the MSP in the form of concepts, instances, relationships, and axioms. Our ontology also facilitates the integration and interpretation of community data, and can help in managing semantic interoperability between different knowledge sources. Future work will focus on defining specifications for the development of a database of indicators and an information system to help decision-makers to view, analyze and organize indicators for their community. This work should improve MSP decision-making in the development of interventions to address childhood obesity.

Modularising ontology and designing inference patterns to personalise health condition assessment: the case of obesity

“…The prevalence of obesity among children and adolescents motivated public health organisations to promote a healthy lifestyle by specifically engaging children [1, 2] and adolescents [1, 3, 4]. The initial activity towards the engagement of individuals consists in the design of a scientifically informed strategy, i.e.…”

“…[2, 17, 18]). Scala et al [18] present an e-Knowledge platform, based on a Web Ontology Language (OWL) [19] ontology and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) [20] rules, classifying individuals according to the obesity level and certain medical conditions (Sarcopenia, Hypertension, Dyslipidemia, Diabetes, Insulin resistance, Metabolic syndrome).…”

“…Scala et al [18] present an e-Knowledge platform, based on a Web Ontology Language (OWL) [19] ontology and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) [20] rules, classifying individuals according to the obesity level and certain medical conditions (Sarcopenia, Hypertension, Dyslipidemia, Diabetes, Insulin resistance, Metabolic syndrome). Arash et al [17] and Addy et al [2] present the preliminary stage of an ontology designed to support a knowledge-based infrastructure, promoting healthy eating habits and lifestyles. In particular, Addy et al [2] aim to support the ontology-based decision making across multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) of the Quebec community involved in the management of childhood obesity.…”

“…Arash et al [17] and Addy et al [2] present the preliminary stage of an ontology designed to support a knowledge-based infrastructure, promoting healthy eating habits and lifestyles. In particular, Addy et al [2] aim to support the ontology-based decision making across multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) of the Quebec community involved in the management of childhood obesity.…”

“…The relevant literature addressing the issues related to obesity mostly refers to specific scenarios, focusing either on adults with certain diseases [18] or on children within a local community context [2, 17]. …”