COVID-19 Ontologies Harmonization Effort

This effort was born out of 2020 Workshop on COVID-19 Ontologies (WCO-2020).
Seven ontologies (6 groups) are part of this effort.

1. CIDO (Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology)

Led by Dr. Oliver He from University of Michigan. CIDO is an BFO based IDO(Infectious Disease Ontology) extension ontology. It reuses multiple OBO foundry ontologies to cover the biological mechinsm, diagnostics, vaccines and drug repurposing for COVID-19

2. HoIP (Homeostasis imbalance process ontology)

Developed in Japan RIKN by Dr. Yuki Yamagata focused on the homeostasis imbalance between virus and innate immune defence from cellular to organ level processes.

3. VIDO

Led by John Beverley from Northwest University in Chicago. It is an IDO extension to cover virus infection.

4. COVID-19-VIDO

Led by John Beverley from Northwest University in Chicago. It is an VIDO extension to cover virus infection.

5. COVoc

A controlled Vocabulary for COVID-19 data portal in EBI led by Zoe Pendlington and Paola Roncaglia.

6. CODO

Dr. Biswanath Dutta developed the CODO to collect and perform COVID-19 data in India to answer epidemiological research questions.

7. MAxO

Develepd by Leigh Carmody at Jackson lab to provide a structured vocabularay for medical procedures, interventions and so on.

Other relevant effort to be joined:

• covid19-epidemiology-ontology (CEMO)
• Genomic Epidemiology Ontology (GenEpiO)
• COVID-19 Ontology

Three Tiers of harmonization

Tier 1: merge harmonizable ontologies (CIDO, COVID-19-VIDO, COVoc, VIDO)

Tier 2: build BFO conformed/aligned ontologies (HoIP, CODO)

Tier 3: interoperable ontologies (non-BFO and BFO based) (MAxO)