Accelerate BASSO Network Center

The Accelerating Behavioral and Social Science through Ontology (ACCELERATE-BASSO) Network and Coordination Center is a partnership of six institutions building shared, reusable ontology standards for the behavioral and social sciences.

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NASEM 2022 report

The Network at a Glance

4

U01 Projects

across four research domains

2

Working Groups

best practices & resource sharing

6

Partner Institutions

across the U.S. and U.K.

9

Ontologies

in the Resource Portal

19

Publications

catalogued to date

40

Portal Resources

tools, datasets & communities

Counts as of July 2026, from the BASSO Resource Portal

General Description of the Network

The Accelerating Behavioral and Social Science through Ontology Development and Use (ACCELERATE-BASSO) Network brings together complementary research projects and a coordinating center to advance the development, evaluation, integration, and use of ontologies in behavioral and social sciences research (BSSR). Through shared scientific activities, technical standards, interoperable resources, and engagement with relevant communities, the Network will strengthen the infrastructure needed to build a cumulative and integrated BSSR knowledge base.

The Network will:

1.

Promote collaboration, scientific exchange, and cross-project learning;

2.

Establish shared technical and methodological approaches for developing, evaluating, integrating, and maintaining BSSR ontologies;

3.

Develop and disseminate interoperable tools, resources, training materials, and implementation guidance;

4.

Engage researchers, ontology developers, biomedical informaticians, practitioners, and other stakeholders to ensure that Network products address community needs; and

5.

Advance the integration of behavioral and social concepts, measures, and findings across disciplines.

The ACCELERATE-BASSO Coordinating Center will provide the administrative, technical, computational, informatics, dissemination, and stakeholder-engagement support needed to sustain these Network-wide activities.

Goals of the Network

1. Build and sustain a collaborative BSSR ontology research network.

Establish the governance, communication, and collaborative structures needed for coordination, consensus development, and shared scientific activities.

2. Create a common framework for rigorous and interoperable ontology development.

Develop shared principles, technical specifications, standard operating procedures, and evaluation approaches for ontology development, alignment, documentation, governance, and maintenance.

3. Develop and disseminate a shared ontology toolbox.

Create accessible tools, templates, training materials, exemplars, and implementation guidance that enable researchers and other stakeholders to find, evaluate, adopt, and extend Network products.

4. Promote community engagement, adoption, and integration.

Engage relevant scientific and user communities throughout the ontology lifecycle and align Network products with existing behavioral, social, clinical, and biomedical ontologies and terminology systems.

Impact

The ACCELERATE-BASSO Network will establish a coordinated national infrastructure for ontology development and use in BSSR. Its shared frameworks, interoperable resources, and training products will help address inconsistent terminology, overlapping constructs, fragmented measures, and limited integration of behavioral and social concepts across research domains.

By enabling more consistent representation of concepts and relationships, comparison and integration of findings across studies, and reuse of research products, the Network will strengthen the rigor, reproducibility, interoperability, and cumulative value of BSSR. Ultimately, it will provide a foundation for integrating behavioral and social knowledge more fully into biomedical research and accelerating the development and implementation of effective interventions.

Cover of the 2022 National Academies report: Ontologies in the Behavioral Sciences

Ontologies in the Behavioral Sciences: Accelerating Research and the Spread of Knowledge

This report describes how ontologies support science and its application to real-world problems.

It also details how ontologies function, how they can be engineered to better support the behavioral sciences, and the resources needed to sustain their development and use to help ensure the maximum benefit from investment in behavioral science research. The full report was published in May 2022.

Read the report