Infectious Disease Ontology Workshop - Medinfo 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.