Towards Desiderata for an Ontology of Diseases for the Annotation of Biological Datasets

Abstract

There is a plethora of disease ontologies available, all potentially useful for the annotation of biological datasets. We define seven desirable features for such ontologies and examine whether or not these features are supported by eleven disease ontologies. The four ontologies most closely aligned with our desiderata are Disease Ontology, SNOMED CT, NCI thesaurus and UMLS.