  Background: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), a set of negative events
and processes that a person might encounter during childhood and adolescence,
have been proven to be linked to increased risks of a multitude of negative
health outcomes and conditions when children reach adulthood and beyond.
  Objective: To better understand the relationship between ACEs and their
relevant risk factors with associated health outcomes and to eventually design
and implement preventive interventions, access to an integrated coherent
dataset is needed. Therefore, we implemented a formal ontology as a resource to
allow the mental health community to facilitate data integration and knowledge
modeling and to improve ACEs surveillance and research.
  Methods: We use advanced knowledge representation and Semantic Web tools and
techniques to implement the ontology. The current implementation of the
ontology is expressed in the description logic ALCRIQ(D), a sublogic of Web
Ontology Language (OWL 2).
  Results: The ACEs Ontology has been implemented and made available to the
mental health community and the public via the BioPortal repository. Moreover,
multiple use-case scenarios have been introduced to showcase and evaluate the
usability of the ontology in action. The ontology was created to be used by
major actors in the ACEs community with different applications, from the
diagnosis of individuals and predicting potential negative outcomes that they
might encounter to the prevention of ACEs in a population and designing
interventions and policies.
  Conclusions: The ACEs Ontology provides a uniform and reusable semantic
network and an integrated knowledge structure for mental health practitioners
and researchers to improve ACEs surveillance and evaluation.
