Communities to join¶
Open standards are maintained by working groups that welcome new contributors, including people who bring a use case and no code. This page lists where to take a question or a proposal.
| Community | What to bring | How to take part |
|---|---|---|
| OHDSI GIS working group | A research question that needs geographic or environmental data joined to OMOP | Weekly meetings on Fridays at 10 a.m. Eastern; propose a use case as a GitHub issue. Get started |
| ECTO | A request for a new exposure class or a route or medium variant | Open an issue on the ECTO tracker |
| ENVO | A missing environmental feature, material or process | Open an issue on the ENVO tracker |
| Mondo | Disease term requests and mapping corrections | Mondo tracker |
| HPO | Phenotype term requests | HPO tracker |
| Monarch Initiative | Cross-ontology questions spanning disease, phenotype and exposure | monarchinitiative.org |
| GA4GH | Proposals for Phenopackets and Beacon | ga4gh.org |
| LinkML | Schema design questions | linkml.io |
| LOINC | Requests for new observation codes | loinc.org/submissions |
| Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) | Geospatial interoperability, including its health domain working group | ogc.org |
| Esri Community | ArcGIS questions, including a health and human services space | community.esri.com |
Writing a useful term request¶
A request is most likely to be accepted when it includes a proposed label, a one-sentence definition with a citation, the parent term, the design pattern if the ontology uses them, and the use case that needs it. Search labels and synonyms first, because a concept may exist under a different preferred name.
Contributing an ALS use case¶
ALS researchers and mapping teams can bring environmental linkage questions to the OHDSI GIS working group and submit term requests when existing ontologies do not represent a needed concept. Documenting these use cases helps other neurodegenerative disease studies reuse the methods.