Topalis Pantelis, Mitraka Elvira, Dritsou Vicky, Dialynas Emmanuel, Louis Christos
Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas and Department of Biology, University of Crete, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
J Biomed Semantics. 2013 Sep 13;4(1):16. doi: 10.1186/2041-1480-4-16.
With 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.
In 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.
In 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).
疟疾是全球主要的传染病之一，病例约达5亿，其中近100万例为致命病例。最近重启的消除疟疾行动也注重利用信息技术资源进行有效防控，这主要包括控制传播疟原虫病原体的蚊媒。作为这项工作的一部分，已开发出IDOMAL并不断更新。
除了改进IDOMAL的结构和纠正一些不准确之处外，还增加了一些主要子领域，如天然产物与疗法部分，以及从其他高阶本体引入的几个术语，并将其与IDOMAL术语合并。已努力使IDOMAL作为传染病本体IDO的扩展完全兼容。难以完全实现这一目标的原因在于媒介传播疾病与“经典”传染病之间的固有差异，这使得有必要专门调整本体架构以纳入媒介及其种群。
除了提高特定领域术语的覆盖范围并优化数据库和决策支持系统对其的使用外，本文所述的新版IDOMAL还使其与其他本体，特别是IDO之间能够进行更多的交互。疟疾本体可在OBO铸造厂（http://www.obofoundry.org/cgi-bin/detail.cgi?id=malaria_ontology）和NCBO生物门户（http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/1311）上下载。
