Table 1.

The relevance of existing ontologies to the clinical infectious disease decision support domain

Resource	Type	Clinical infectious disease knowledge content	Suitability of resource for clinical infectious disease decision support domain	Relevance to the BCIDO
Medical Subject Headings Controlled Vocabulary (MeSH)	Controlled vocabulary	Comprehensive coverage	Terms appear in hierarchies on the basis of relatedness for document retrieval and are not is-a relationships. Terms are not linked by relations	Terms used in an infectious diseases ontology can be mapped to MeSH
International Classification of Diseases – 10 (ICD-10)	Clinical terminology	Reasonable coverage but lacks depth	Disease classification is based on anatomy and pathological structures, however the infectious disease domain does not follow anatomical partitions. Therefore, the hierarchy is not logical for clinical infectious diseases	Terms used in an infectious diseases ontology can be mapped to ICD-10
Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT)	Clinical terminology	Comprehensive coverage of clinical terms	Multiple modes of classification limits the capability of automated reasoning The result is the assertion of type-supertype relations that do not hold. There are no natural language definitions.	Terms used in an infectious diseases ontology were mapped to SNOMED-CT
Disease Ontology (DO)	Ontology	Limited coverage	Disorganized hierarchy for infectious diseases. Mixes types of infection with types of disease, as well as mixing types based on anatomical location, type of infectious agent or clinical syndrome and properties of infectious agents	Terms used in an infectious diseases ontology can be mapped to DO
Antibiotic prescribing ontology	Ontology	Limited to common infections seen in hospital	Suitable, however, the ontology is not publically available. Narrow range of clinical infectious disease syndromes.	Provides proof of principle that an ontology can provide the knowledge base for decision support
Infectious Diseases Ontology (IDO)	Ontology	Many of the modules are still in development	Suitable. Before BCIDO, there was no IDO module corresponding to the clinical ID domain.	The core IDO was used as the upper ontology.