The POEM ontology aims to support the usage of psychometric instruments, particularly questionnaires, which are used in varying settings and contexts to assess psychiatric conditions. POEM encodes mental health terminology including symptoms, syndromes, scales, conditions, and their relationships, based on existing terminologies such as SNOMED-CT and the DSM-5. Support for questionnaires comes from the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO) ontology, which includes an instrument-focused subset (VSTO-I), allowing POEM to capture sufficient psychometric instrument and detector semantics. POEM supports the Semantic Instrument Repository (SIR), a repository of knowledge about instruments and detectors, enabling the discovery of available instruments based on desired symptoms and conditions to assess, data harmonization and understanding, and interoperability.
The POEM ontology is not intended to find some definitive “truth” about psychological measurement, but to represent the domain sufficiently to support the encoding of psychometric instruments for creation, translation, usage, and reusage.
Point of Contact
Kelsey Rook, rookk@rpi.edu
Henrique Santos, oliveh@rpi.edu
Deborah L. McGuinness, dlm@rpi.edu