A Metrics Ontology. An intellectual infrastructure for defining, managing, and applying metrics.

This paper presents the beginnings of a comprehensive ontology for organizing information about metrics and its potential application to defining and managing metrics in the CTSA (Clinical and Translational Science Award) project. The aim is to support an integrated database of all metrics used by CTSA components. The ontology is given as an entity-relationship conceptual data schema. Its completion should draw on metrics definition templates that can be found in many places.