Abstract
Background
Ontologies represent powerful tools in information technology because they enhance interoperability and facilitate, among other things, the construction of optimized search engines. To address the need to expand the toolbox available for the control and prevention of vector-borne diseases we embarked on the construction of specific ontologies. We present here IDODEN, an ontology that describes dengue fever, one of the globally most important diseases that are transmitted by mosquitoes.
Methodology/Principal Findings
We constructed IDODEN using open source software, and modeled it on IDOMAL, the malaria ontology developed previously. IDODEN covers all aspects of dengue fever, such as disease biology, epidemiology and clinical features. Moreover, it covers all facets of dengue entomology. IDODEN, which is freely available, can now be used for the annotation of dengue-related data and, in addition to its use for modeling, it can be utilized for the construction of other dedicated IT tools such as decision support systems.
Conclusions/Significance
The availability of the dengue ontology will enable databases hosting dengue-associated data and decision-support systems for that disease to perform most efficiently and to link their own data to those stored in other independent repositories, in an architecture- and software-independent manner.
The need for the construction of a dengue ontology arose through the fact that the incidence of dengue fever is on the rise across the world; the number of cases may be three to four times higher than the 100 million estimated by the WHO and a vaccine is still not available in spite of the significant efforts undertaken. Thus, control of dengue fever still relies mostly on controlling its mosquito vectors. Large amounts of entomological, epidemiological and clinical data are generated; these need to be efficiently organized in order to further our comprehension of the disease and its control. IDODEN aims to cover the different aspects and intricacies of dengue fever and syndromes caused by dengue virus(es). It contains more than 5000 terms describing epidemiological data, vaccine development, clinical features, the disease course, and more. We show here that it can be a helpful tool for researchers and that, in addition to allowing sophisticated search strategies, it is also useful for tasks such as modeling.
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