The Human Behaviour-Change Project Phase 2: Advancing behavioural and social sciences through ontology tools

Changing behaviour at scale is needed to address the major challenges facing humanity: from preventing and treating disease to tackling the climate crisis. Developing effective interventions to achieve this requires efficient generation and use of scientific evidence. The Human Behaviour-Change Project developed an extensive ontology of behaviour change interventions, their contexts and mechanisms of action to organise global evidence about behaviour change and predict intervention outcomes in novel behaviour change scenarios. The APRICOT (Advancing Prevention Research In Cancer through Ontology Tools) project extends this work by developing (i) ontologies covering health-related behaviours, (ii) a Community of Practice for ontologies in the social and behavioural sciences, and (iii) tools and resources to make ontologies more useable and useful. It will also develop methods to apply and integrate ontologies with real-world data related to the social and environmental determinants of health and inequalities, and to facilitate their uptake in behavioural science practice.