Brucellosis Ontology (IDOBRU) as an extension of the Infectious Disease Ontology

The Brucellosis Ontology (IDOBRU: http://sourceforge.net/projects/idobru webcite), a biomedical ontology in the brucellosis domain, is an extension ontology of the core Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO-core) and follows OBO Foundry principles. Currently IDOBRU contains 1503 ontology terms, which includes 739 Brucella-specific terms, 414 IDO-core terms, and 350 terms imported from 10 existing ontologies. IDOBRU has been used to model different aspects of brucellosis, including host infection, zoonotic disease transmission, symptoms, virulence factors and pathogenesis, diagnosis, intentional release, vaccine prevention, and treatment. Case studies are typically used in our IDOBRU modeling. For example, diurnal temperature variation in Brucella patients, a Brucella-specific PCR method, and a WHO-recommended brucellosis treatment were selected as use cases to model brucellosis symptom, diagnosis, and treatment, respectively. Developed using OWL, IDOBRU supports OWL-based ontological reasoning. For example, by performing a Description Logic (DL) query in the OWL editor Protégé 4 or a SPARQL query in an IDOBRU SPARQL server, a check of Brucella virulence factors showed that eight of them are known protective antigens based on the biological knowledge captured within the ontology.IDOBRU is the first reported bacterial infectious disease ontology developed to represent different disease aspects in a formal logical format. It serves as a brucellosis knowledgebase and supports brucellosis data integration and automated reasoning.Brucellosis is a zoonotic infectious disease caused by intracellular Gram-negative bacteria Brucella spp. Since its initial isolation from tissue of a deceased patient by Dr. David Bruce in 1887 [1], Brucella has been found in many animals, including cattle, pigs, goat, sheep, dogs, fish and so on. Human brucellosis remains the most common zoonotic disease worldwide, with more than 500, 000 new cases reported annually [2]. The variety of its clinical