Proceedings of the International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (
2022)
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted immense work on the investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Ontologies –
structured, controlled, vocabularies – are designed to support consistency of interpretation, and thereby to prevent
the development of data silos. This paper describes how ontologies are serving this purpose in the virus research
domain, following the principles of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and drawing on
the resources of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) Core. We report the development of the Virus Infectious
Disease Ontology (VIDO), a reference ontology extending IDO Core covering viral infectious diseases. We examine
newly minted terms, showcase ontology term reuse, and illustrate the use of VIDO by annotating selections from
recent life science research on SAR-CoV-2, in the interest of supporting machine learning projects.