Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is defined as an insult to the brain from an external force and is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States. However, no effective clinical therapeutics currently exist for this injury. Although several therapies and procedures have been deemed successful for TBI treatment in preclinical research studies, they have yet to translate into human patients. These discouraging results have left many scientists questioning the role of animal models for drug discovery in TBI.

One major hurdle in disseminating the knowledge obtained in the laboratory to the clinic is the methodological variance within the (across multiple studies) and to human patients. The initial steps to address these knowledge gaps are identifying these studies and ensuring that researchers use the same language to explicitly describe and report their research. We are developing the Brain Injury Knowledge Ontology for TBI (BIKO-TBI) to create a standardized language to describe methods and outcome measures used within preclinical and clinical TBI therapy studies. We used WebProtege, Protege and RDFLib package to structure and build the ontology. The first version of BIKO-TBI provide a standardized method to define and associate experimental design parameters (injury models and methods) and outcome measures used in preclinical and clinical TBI therapy studies. BIKO-TBI will provide a machine-readable way to represent the methodologies used in TBI therapeutic studies.