Community Name, Mission, Goals Environmental Health Language Collaborative

To kick-start the conversation, the following community vision, mission, and goals are being proposed for community input.

The vision of the Environmental Health Language Collaborative is to leverage community-driven environmental health language standards to catalyze knowledge-driven discovery and improve public health.

The Collaborative’s mission is to advance integrative environmental health research by developing and promoting adoption of a harmonized language. To achieve this mission, the community will:

• Apply language standards and best practices for accurate environmental health data and knowledge representation
• Cultivate a vocabulary aware environmental health community through training and education
• Foster community-based development of harmonized vocabularies, terminologies, and ontologies
• Identify use cases for applying knowledge organization systems in research
• Promote and develop methods and tools for applying harmonized language in research

The community would be composed of three elements:

Community of Practice. A community of practice to exchange information, ideas, and expertise. In addition, the community will be a place to advance the appreciation for and adoption of semantic and language approaches through education and training.

Forum to Coordinate and Collaborate. The community serves as a hub to coordinate harmonization activities and collaborate on defining use cases and gaps, prioritizing activities, and describing the language strategies or approaches to enable data querying, sharing, and interoperability.

Platform to Develop and Implement. Based on identified gaps in use cases, the community serves to support and promote the development and application of harmonized language solutions to address use case needs.