Environmental Health Language Collaborative
NIEHS and EPA are fostering a community-driven initiative, the Environmental Health Language Collaborative. The Collaborative is a community for those who generate, analyze, or manage environmental health science (EHS) data and want to ensure the data are formatted and annotated using common EHS language standards to promote data discovery, interoperability, and reuse. The Collaborative is addressing this mission through three high-level strategic goals:
- Foster community-based extension and development of vocabularies, terminologies, and ontologies, and develop methods and tools to apply those resources
- 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
The Collaborative’s website has resources including a glossary, bibliography, links to ontologies, and overview videos.
The Collaborative presented six webinars during 2024 and 2025 and held a two-day international workshop in June 2025 on the standardization of adverse outcome pathways. Videos and materials from the webinars and workshops are available on the Collaborative’s website. The Collaborative also maintains use-case working groups to explore language solutions that will enhance the findability, reuse, and/or operability of environmental health and safety data. Current working groups are focused on the use cases of “Biomarkers and Biological Processes of Exposure,” “Data Discovery,” and “Data Harmonization.” All working groups meet periodically and welcome new members. The Data Harmonization Use Case working group submitted a manuscript in 2025 (Stingone et al. 2026) and is working on two additional papers. Other use cases have manuscripts in preparation.