Welcome to Ontae!

Ontae is a web-based ontology-based vaccine adverse event (VAE) case reporting and analysis system.

The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS, http://www.vaers.hhs.gov/) is an official vaccine post-marketing safety surveillance program that collects information about adverse events that occur after the administration of US licensed vaccines. VAERS is supported by the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) as a controlled terminology system. However, MedDRA has many disadvantages including the lack of definitions of terms and term relations.

An ontology is a system of consensus-based controlled vocabularies of terms and their relationships, with associated definitions that are logically formulated in such a way as to promote automated reasoning. Ontae primarily relies on two ontologies: the Ontology of Adverse Events (OAE), and the Vaccine Ontology (VO; http://www.violinet.org/vaccineontology/). OAE ontologically represents various adverse events. VO includes all licensed human vaccines. The integrative usage of OAE and VO supports our Ontae development.

Ontae includes two parts: Ontae VAE reporting, and Ontae VAE data analysis.

(1) Ontae VAE Study

(2) Ontae VAE case reporting

The current Ontae VAE case report system follows the basic design of VAERS and includes the majority of the features shown in VAERS. Our VAE reporting system covers similar data input currently available in VAERS and also includes modifications for possible reporting improvements. This prototype provides a basis for further development of ontology-based VAE reporting system.

(3) Ontae VAE analysis

Ontae VAE analysis system stores all the publicly available VAE data from VAERS system and provides both web-based data query and analysis components. The same setting can also be used to query the VAE data reported from our own VAE reporting system. Our Ontae analysis system will be developed to analyze the VAE data from VAERS as well as the data reported to our own VAE reporting system.