The epidemiology ontology: an ontology for the semantic annotation of epidemiological resources

Background: Epidemiology is a data-intensive and multi-disciplinary subject, where data integration, curation and sharing are becoming increasingly relevant, given its global context and time constraints. The semantic annotation of epidemiology resources is a cornerstone to effectively support such activities. Although several ontologies cover some of the subdomains of epidemiology, we identified a lack of semantic resources for epidemiology-specific terms. This paper addresses this need by proposing the Epidemiology Ontology (EPO) and by describing its integration with other related ontologies into a semantic enabled platform for sharing epidemiology resources. Results: The EPO follows the OBO Foundry guidelines and uses the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper ontology. The first version of EPO models several epidemiology and demography parameters as well as transmission of infection processes, participants and related procedures. It currently has nearly 200 classes and is designed to support the semantic annotation of epidemiology resources and data integration, as well as information retrieval and knowledge discovery activities. Conclusions: EPO is under active development and is freely available at https://code.google.com/p/epidemiology-ontology/. We believe that the annotation of epidemiology resources with EPO will help researchers to gain a better understanding of global epidemiological events by enhancing data integration and sharing.