OntoChem team contributes to EU report on mental health policy
Claudia Bobach and Safiya Pladunova of Digital Science’s OntoChem team are among the co-authors of the European Commission’s Decoding Depression: Exploring the Environment Across Life Course — a transdisciplinary science-for-policy report focused on the complex, multidimensional drivers of depression.
An important component of the report is InDepDash (Interactive Depression Dashboard), a semantic analysis platform that synthesises open-access scientific literature across domains such as clinical research, pharmacology, nutrition, social science, and environmental health. OntoChem’s ontologies underpin the dashboard’s architecture, enabling consistent identification and classification of key concepts across 160 million full-text documents using FAIR-aligned ontology concept identifiers (OCIDs).
The semantic framework supports co-occurrence analysis at the paragraph level, highlighting associations between depression and a wide range of variables — from individual behaviours and comorbidities to environmental stressors and socio-economic indicators. This structured approach enables scalable, reproducible insight extraction from unstructured literature, making it possible to trace patterns and inform data-driven mental health policy and research prioritisation at scale.
The collaboration illustrates the practical application of ontology-based knowledge systems in cross-sectoral health initiatives, particularly where complexity and interdisciplinarity are central.