Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 24, 2025

Author Spotlight: Advancements in Multiplex Detection of Respiratory Viruses
Published on: November 10, 2023
The COVID-19 Ontology
Astghik Sargsyan1,2, Alpha Tom Kodamullil1, Shounak Baksi3
1Department of Bioinformatics, Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI), 53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany.
Motivation:
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted an impressive, worldwide response by the academic community. In order to support text mining approaches as well as data description, linking and harmonization in the context of COVID-19, we have developed an ontology representing major novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) entities. The ontology has a strong scope on chemical entities suited for drug repurposing, as this is a major target of ongoing COVID-19 therapeutic development.
Results:
The ontology comprises 2270 classes of concepts and 38 987 axioms (2622 logical axioms and 2434 declaration axioms). It depicts the roles of molecular and cellular entities in virus-host interactions and in the virus life cycle, as well as a wide spectrum of medical and epidemiological concepts linked to COVID-19. The performance of the ontology has been tested on Medline and the COVID-19 corpus provided by the Allen Institute.
Availabilityand Implementation:
COVID-19 Ontology is released under a Creative Commons 4.0 License and shared via https://github.com/covid-19-ontology/covid-19. The ontology is also deposited in BioPortal at https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/COVID-19.
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Concepts of Health and Illness
Causality in Epidemiology
Principles of Disease Surveillance
Classification of Illness
An illness is a response to a disease in which the person's level of functioning is changed compared with a previous level. The general classification of illness includes acute and chronic.
Acute illness is severe...
Pneumonia II: Pathophysiology
Healthcare Associated Infections I: Iatrogenic, Exogenic and Endogenic
HAIs significantly increase the cost of health care. Extended stays in healthcare institutions, increased disability, increased costs of medications, including specialized antibiotics, and prolonged recovery times add to the patient's expenses and the healthcare institution and funding bodies.

