IDOMAL: the malaria ontology revisited

Pantelis Topalis,Emmanuel Dialynas,Vicky Dritsou,Elvira Mitraka,Christos Louis

doi:10.1186/2041-1480-4-16

Abstract

BackgroundWith about half a billion cases, of which nearly one million fatal ones, malaria constitutes one of the major infectious diseases worldwide. A recently revived effort to eliminate the disease also focuses on IT resources for its efficient control, which prominently includes the control of the mosquito vectors that transmit the Plasmodium pathogens. As part of this effort, IDOMAL has been developed and it is continually being updated.FindingsIn addition to the improvement of IDOMAL’s structure and the correction of some inaccuracies, there were some major subdomain additions such as a section on natural products and remedies, and the import, from other, higher order ontologies, of several terms, which were merged with IDOMAL terms. Effort was put on rendering IDOMAL fully compatible as an extension of IDO, the Infectious Disease Ontology. The reason for the difficulties in fully reaching that target were the inherent differences between vector-borne diseases and “classical” infectious diseases, which make it necessary to specifically adjust the ontology’s architecture in order to comprise vectors and their populations.ConclusionsIn addition to a higher coverage of domain-specific terms and optimizing its usage by databases and decision-support systems, the new version of IDOMAL described here allows for more cross-talk between it and other ontologies, and in particular IDO. The malaria ontology is available for downloading at the OBO Foundry (http://www.obofoundry.org/cgi-bin/detail.cgi?id=malaria_ontology) and the NCBO BioPortal (http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/1311).

Highlights

With about half a billion cases, of which nearly one million fatal ones, malaria constitutes one of the major infectious diseases worldwide
In addition to a higher coverage of domain-specific terms and optimizing its usage by databases and decision-support systems, the new version of Infectious disease ontology-malaria (IDOMAL) described here allows for more cross-talk between it and other ontologies, and in particular Infectious disease ontology (IDO)
The malaria ontology is available for downloading at the Open and biomedical ontologies (OBO) Foundry and the National center for biomedical ontology (NCBO) BioPortal

Summary

Conclusions

It was not unexpected that IDOMAL had to undergo several updates, partial revisions and expansion during the three years after it was published, which all are summarized in this report. Genes are usually only annotated with GO terms [25], the day is not far when they, and other data in genomic/biological databases, will be annotated with ontological terms describing these domains, such as, for example, VectorBase, the database that covers arthropod disease vectors [26]. Novel IT tools such as decision support systems are already making use of ontologies [27] and, even more, tools are planned that will be able to direct information to and from ontologies and data holders [28]. In the domain of vector-borne diseases, IDOMAL and MIRO, an ontology of Mosquito Insecticide Resistance [29] that has been fully integrated in IDOMAL, are used by newly developed Decision Support Systems for vector-borne diseases [30,31].

Background

World Health Organization