The IDO Ontologies

The IDO ontologies are a set of interoperable ontologies that together provide coverage of the infectious disease domain.  At the core of the set is a general Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) of entities relevant to both biomedical and clinical aspects of infectious diseases generally.  Sub-domain specific extensions of the core IDO complete the set providing ontology coverage of entities relevant to specific sub-domains of the infectious disease field, such as specific diseases or specific areas of research.  The sub-domain specific IDO extensions currently under development are:

1. •IDO - Dengue fever
   

2. •IDO - infective endocarditis
   

3. •IDO - influenza
   

4. •IDO - malaria and other vector-borne diseases
   

5. •IDO - Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia
   

6. •IDO - tuberculosis
   

7. •IDO - Vaccines
   

More information about each of these ontologies can be found on the IDO Extensions page.

The Need for Infectious Disease Ontology

In recent years, the benefits of ontology for the management, integration, and processing of data and information have been realized, resulting in a surge of interest in ontology within the biomedical research community and the NIH.  As yet, however, there is little ontology coverage of the infectious disease domain resulting in both an urgent need for ontology development in this field and the opportunity for a coordinated, community-wide effort rooted in ontology development best practices.

Infectious Disease Ontology Development Strategy

We propose a community-wide ontology development effort focused on the development of a set of interoperable ontologies that together provide adequate coverage of the infectious disease domain.  The proposed set of ontologies includes a general Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) along with sub-domain-specific ontologies developed as extensions of the neutral core.  The proposed modular approach affords many benefits.  Each sub-domain-specific ontology can be developed and maintained by researchers expert in that particular disease ensuring biological accuracy.  The resulting division of labor allows rapid progress towards the needed set of ontologies.  Coordination of the development effort through the use of the neutral core IDO ensures interoperability between the sub-domain-specific ontologies.

We recommend an approach to development of the proposed ontologies based on the principles of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry and extensive use of its member ontologies.  This approach ensures that IDO and its sub-domain-specific extensions have sufficient underlying formalism to support computational analyses and automated reasoning and that they are interoperable with other relevant biomedical and clinical ontologies, including those outside the domain of infectious diseases.

We have formed an Infectious Disease Ontology Consortium that has as its mission the creation and maintenance of the described set of ontologies.  We invite interested researchers to visit the Consortium page and to join.