GSSO

GSSO provides a manually curated ontology of over 4,000 entities representing concepts related to gender identity, sexual orientation, and reproductive behavior to enable standardized representation and interoperability with clinical terminologies such as SNOMED-CT and MedDRA.

Key Features:

• Scope: Contains over 4,000 entities covering terms for gender identity, sexual orientation, and reproductive behavior.
• Disciplinary coverage: Entities are derived from biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, and gender studies.
• Curation: Entries are curated manually to ensure conceptual accuracy and relevance.
• Interoperability: Integrates with over 20 external ontology resources, explicitly including SNOMED-CT and MedDRA.
• Terminology standardization: Provides standardized representations of GSSO concepts to reduce ambiguity across clinical and research contexts.
• Planned expansion: Includes plans for multilingual support to extend applicability across languages.
• Planned validation: Empirical evaluations are planned to validate and refine ontology content.

Scientific Applications:

• Clinical terminology harmonization: Standardizes gender- and sexuality-related terms for use in clinical documentation and coding systems.
• Clinical interoperability: Facilitates mapping between GSSO concepts and clinical vocabularies such as SNOMED-CT and MedDRA for integration with health data systems.
• Research and education: Serves as a reference ontology for research studies and educational resources addressing gender, sex, and sexual orientation.
• Mitigation of misrepresentation: Supports efforts to identify and correct historical and contemporary misrepresentations affecting LGBTQIA+ populations in medical and psychological contexts.

Methodology:

Entities are curated manually and mapped/integrated with external ontology resources (over 20, including SNOMED-CT and MedDRA).