A Fourfold Pathogen Reference Ontology Suite
This work addresses the problem of standardizing and organizing infectious disease data for researchers and healthcare professionals, but it is incremental as it builds on existing IDO frameworks.
The authors tackled the need for updated pathogen-specific ontologies in infectious disease data management by creating four new reference ontologies (VIDO, BIDO, MIDO, PIDO) using a hub-and-spoke methodology, which advances modularization and reusability within the IDO ecosystem.
Infectious diseases remain a critical global health challenge, and the integration of standardized ontologies plays a vital role in managing related data. The Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) and its extensions, such as the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), are essential for organizing and disseminating information related to infectious diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for updating IDO and its virus-specific extensions. There is an additional need to update IDO extensions specific to bacteria, fungus, and parasite infectious diseases. We adopt the "hub and spoke" methodology to generate pathogen-specific extensions of IDO: Virus Infectious Disease Ontology (VIDO), Bacteria Infectious Disease Ontology (BIDO), Mycosis Infectious Disease Ontology (MIDO), and Parasite Infectious Disease Ontology (PIDO). The creation of pathogen-specific reference ontologies advances modularization and reusability of infectious disease data within the IDO ecosystem. Future work will focus on further refining these ontologies, creating new extensions, and developing application ontologies based on them, in line with ongoing efforts to standardize biological and biomedical terminologies for improved data sharing and analysis.