John Beverley, assistant professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), has been awarded a $3.8 million grant from the National Institute on Aging for a project focused on philosophically-informed ontology development related to the psychological study of aging.

image by J. Weinberg

The grant will support an interdisciplinary team’s work to develop and disseminate “a novel set of ontologies focusing on solitude, gerotranscendence, healthy aging, and nearby phenomena.”

Gerotranscendence refers to “increased psychological connectedness beyond oneself,” which is linked with “greater attention to personal meaning [and] social connections” and related to “positive aging-related outcomes such as increased psychological well-being and longevity.”

The project has three aims:

Aim 1: Develop ontologies for solitude, gerotranscendence, and healthy aging research. We will develop two ontologies—the Solitude Ontology and the Gerotranscendence Ontology—each extending from and so connected by the Behavior Change Intervention Ontology, to cover gerotranscendence and solitude constructs, relevant developmental psychology theories, measurements, and interventions. These ontologies will be developed and refined through consensus-building meetings with subject-matter experts, following principles of and reusing terms from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry.

Aim 2: Create an open-access ontology-based web interface integrating solitude, gerotranscendence, and healthy aging data. Relevant solitude and gerotranscendence data will be mapped to our ontologies from the National Library of Medicine and the Open Science Foundation, using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources as a common data model. The results will underwrite a web portal featuring a recommender system, allowing researchers to remain up-to-date on research using ontology-based enrichment strategies, and a cross-article question-answer system, matching natural language queries to answers based on intricate relationships among constructs.

Aim 3: Promote our ontologies, train stakeholders to investigate the impact of solitude on successful aging and disseminate results to the broader community. We will train stakeholders to use our portal to investigate relationships between solitude and gerotranscendence constructs, and healthy aging, the results of which will be disseminated in research articles, to include reviews of solitude and gerotranscendence literature, a technical report on the uses of our portal, and articles describing our ontology work.

If you’re interested in learning more about applied ontology, here’s a “Noûsletter” article about the “birth” of the field from 1998.