Cochrane Ontologies

The PICO ontology provides a machine accessible version of the PICO framework. It essentially provides a model for describing evidence in a consistent way. The model allows the specifying of complex populations, detailed interventions and their comparisons as well as the outcomes considered.

The PICO ontology was originally designed to model the questions asked and answered in Cochrane's systematic reviews. As a leader in the field of evidence based healthcare Cochrane uses the PICO model when framing and publishing evidence based questions.

The PICO model is widely adopted for describing healthcare evidence, furthermore is equally applicable in other evidence-based domains. It essentially provides a model for describing evidence in a consistent way.

The Cochrane Core ontology describes the entities and concepts that exist in the domain of evidence based healthcare.

It is used for the construction of the Cochrane Linked Data Vocabulary containing some 400k terms including Interventions (Drugs, Procedures etc), Populations (Age, Sex, Condition), and clinical Outcomes.