ClinicalTrial Schema

Hi All,

I've started looking into creating a schema of clinical trial metadata
using schema.org and mapping instances from public repositories (e.g.,
clinicaltrials.gov), to a clinical trial schema that could then be
published to datacommons.org.

From what I see, it looks like a good starting point would be to build on
what has already been defined in the health-lifesci group with
schema.org:MedicalTrial <https://health-lifesci.schema.org/MedicalTrial>.

There are a handful of attempts at doing something similar elsewhere, such
as:

- Wikidata ClinicalTrial
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Medicine/Data_models/Trials>
- Clinical Trial Data as RDF
<https://github.com/phuse-org/CTDasRDF/blob/master/doc/HandsOnCreateTriplesFromOWL.md#more-ts-mapping>

- Open Trials <https://opentrials.net/>
- Linked CT <http://linkedct.org/> - broken ;-(

While those efforts capture semantics, others provide a pretty clean
tabular representation of clinical trial metadata like the AACT database
<https://aact.ctti-clinicaltrials.org/>.

I'd love to start a conversation about how we can create a schema for
clinical trials that fits into the schema.org vision and can publish useful
information like what is in the AACT database as linked data.

I took the humble approach of defining a few terms that would extend the
schema of datacommons.org to capture just a single attribute of a trial
(i.e., phase). I submitted this as a PR
<https://github.com/google/datacommons/pull/41>.

I would love to get feedback on how I can move this idea forward and work
with this community to define a schema that could be used to publish
information about clinical trials.

Cheers,

Nolan

--
Nolan Nichols, PhD
Bioinformatics & Computational Biology
Genentech, Inc.
nichols.nolan@gene.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1099-3328