Cohort Network: A Knowledge Graph toward Data Dissemination and Knowledge-Driven Discovery for Cohort Studies

Contemporary environmental health sciences draw on large-scalelongitudinal studies to understand the impact of environmental exposuresand behavior factors on the risk of disease and identify potentialunderlying mechanisms. In such studies, cohorts of individuals areassembled and followed up over time. Each cohort generates hundredsof publications, which are typically neither coherently organizednor summarized, hence limiting knowledge-driven dissemination. Hence,we propose a Cohort Network, a multilayer knowledge graph approachto extract exposures, outcomes, and their connections. We appliedthe Cohort Network on 121 peer-reviewed papers published over thepast 10 years from the Veterans Affairs (VA) Normative Aging Study(NAS). The Cohort Network visualized connections between exposuresand outcomes across different publications and identified key exposuresand outcomes, such as air pollution, DNA methylation, and lung function.We demonstrated the utility of the Cohort Network for new hypothesisgeneration, e.g., identification of potential mediators of exposure-outcomeassociations. The Cohort Network can be used by investigators to summarizethe cohort's research and facilitate knowledge-driven discoveryand dissemination. Theproposed Cohort Network facilitates knowledge-drivendiscovery and dissemination in cohorts that contain rich informationabout environmental exposures and health outcomes.