Introduction

This tutorial page is intended for i2b2 administrators who are new to i2b2 and clinical informatics. Maybe you've been asked to deploy i2b2 for your institution. Maybe your institution already has an i2b2 instance, and you've just inherited it. You are curious about how things work and how to set up or modify the ontology database.

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• Understanding what an ontology is for i2b2

• Choosing an appropriate ontology tree for i2b2

• Deploying an ontology tree for i2b2

• Understanding how the ontology enables queries in i2b2

Part 1: Ontology Basics

What is an ontology?

"Ontology" represents the branch of Philosophy that discusses "existence." But in Information Science, an "ontology" is a way of listing the attributes of a subject area and showing how these attributes are interrelated. An ontology for a subject area or "domain" consists of a set of terms that represent the entities in (or attributes of) that domain, along with a set of expressions that define how the entities in that domain are related to each other.

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Here is another screenshot, where you can see the expansion for "Race" in the "Demographics" tree:

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Where do i2b2 ontology "concepts" come from?

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Part 2: Choosing Your Ontology

Do all i2b2 instances share the same i2b2 ontology?

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Part 3: How Ontologies and Patient Data Are Tied Together

How does it work? How does the i2b2 ontology make the patient data queryable?

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