AEO: A realism-based biomedical ontology for the representation of adverse events

The Adverse Event Ontology (AEO) is a realism-based biomedical ontology for adverse events. Currently AEO has 484 representational units annotated by means of terms including 369 AEO-specific terms and 115 terms from existing feeder-ontologies. In AEO, the term "adverse event' is used exclusively to denote pathological bodily processes that are induced by a medical intervention. This requirement for a causal association between an adverse event and a medical intervention clearly distinguishes our approach from other approaches according to which any untoward phenomenon observed to have appeared in a mere temporal relation with some medical intervention becomes reported as an 'adverse event'. We label such phenomena as being the subject of 'adverse event hypotheses'.