Infectious Disease Ontology Workshop - Medinfo 2010

Medinfo 2010 Workshop

There will be an IDO workshop at the 13th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics (Medinfo 2010) in Cape Town, South Africa on September 12, 2010.

Infectious diseases inflict a disproportionate burden on developing countries. A lack of adequate treatment and prevention resources has resulted in a higher prevalence of infectious disease among the world's poorest people. This underscores the need for approaches to informatics support which leverage limited resources as effectively and efficiently as possible. Increasingly, response to infectious disease requires the use of information from multiple, constantly changing data sources. Currently, such information is collected using discipline-specific methodologies and is stored in heterogeneous databases, electronic health records, paper charts, and clinical and public health data repositories. Infectious disease data thus often remains only locally accessible, and because it is expressed in incompatible formats it does not allow for broad spectrum computational processing, querying, inference, or verification. Data silos hinder translational and comparative research. Aggregating data through use of a common data format and a common terminology (i.e., an ontology) allows a variety of secondary uses of data such as: rapid determination of pathogen type in infections or disease outbreaks, treatment decision support based on genetic characteristics of host and pathogen (e.g., drug resistance), and research to improve understanding of disease pathogenesis leading to development of new types of treatments. The Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) addresses the problem of data silos by providing a consistent terminology, taxonomy, and logical representation of entities relevant to all infectious diseases. IDO is already being applied to the study of seven diseases, including diseases of bacterial, viral, and eukaryotic origin. The objectives of this workshop are to introduce IDO and the methodology for creating disease-specific IDO extensions, to present applications of the ontologies to the study of Malaria, HIV, and Influenza, and to open up the IDO enterprise to a wider audience of medical informaticians.

Workshop Description

The workshop will consist of five presentations addressing the scope, design, evolution, and practical utility of IDO. Specifically, the first two will describe the principles of IDO and of the ontologies derived from it, and provide also a description of existing database efforts in the infectious disease domain. The remaining presentations will describe disease-specific ontologies developed from IDO and their application to specific data integration and processing tasks, including the planning of disease control measures, the integration of data from studies in humans and studies in model organisms, the study of co-infection, disease surveillance, and the study of viral evolution.

Presenters

• Barry Smith (University at Buffalo)
• Albert Goldfain (Blue Highway LLC)
• Lindsay G. Cowell (Duke University Medical Center)
• Christos Louis (IMBB-FORTH and University of Crete)
• Richard H. Scheuermann (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center)

Intended Audience

The workshop does not assume any prior knowledge of ontologies or the infectious disease domain, and is aimed at a broad audience, including:

• medical informaticians
• biologists
• health care providers
• epidemiologists and public health workers
• bioinformatics researchers
• biomedical researchers
• computer scientists

Goals

• To demonstrate the advantages of a common approach for annotating infectious disease data
• To show how the IDO terminology can be used as a teaching tool.
• To showcase the multidisciplinary nature of IDO.
• To enable interested attendees to begin using IDO for annotating their own datasets.
• To enable interested attendees to begin creating their own IDO extensions.