A globally-applicable disease ontology for biosurveillance; Anthology of Biosurveillance Diseases (ABD)
This addresses a standardization problem for biosurveillance practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing disease subsets without introducing new methods.
The authors tackled the lack of a standardized method to describe diseases in biosurveillance by creating the Anthology of Biosurveillance Diseases (ABD), an ontology for infectious diseases relevant to the field.
Biosurveillance, a relatively young field, has recently increased in importance because of its relevance to national security and global health. Databases and tools describing particular subsets of disease are becoming increasingly common in the field. However, a common method to describe those diseases is lacking. Here, we present the Anthology of Biosurveillance Diseases (ABD), an ontology of infectious diseases of biosurveillance relevance.