Guiding principles for technical infrastructure to support computable biomedical knowledge

• Published in: Learning health systems Vol. 7; no. 3; pp. e10352 - n/a
• Main Authors: McCusker, Jamie, McIntosh, Leslie D., Shaffer, Chris, Boisvert, Peter, Ryan, James, Navale, Vivek, Topaloglu, Umit, Richesson, Rachel L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States John Wiley & Sons, Inc 01-07-2023; John Wiley and Sons Inc; Wiley
• Subjects: Commentaries; computable biomedical knowledge; COVID-19; FAIR; Health care policy; Infrastructure; Interoperability; Knowledge representation; Metadata; open systems; Pandemics; Principles; Working groups; FAIR; open systems; computable biomedical knowledge
• ISSN: 2379-6146; 2379-6146
• DOI: 10.1002/lrh2.10352

Over the past 4 years, the authors have participated as members of the Mobilizing Computable Biomedical Knowledge Technical Infrastructure working group and focused on conceptualizing the infrastructure required to use computable biomedical knowledge. Here, we summarize our thoughts and lay the foundation for future work in the development of CBK infrastructure, including: explaining the difference between computable knowledge and data, and contextualizing the conversation with the Learning Health Systems and the FAIR principles. Specifically, we provide three guiding principles to advance the development of CBK infrastructure: (a) Promote interoperable systems for data and knowledge to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. (b) Enable stable, trustworthy knowledge representations that are human and machine readable. (c) Computable knowledge resources should, when possible, be open. Standards supporting computable knowledge infrastructures must be open.