The Epilepsy Ontology: a community-based ontology tailored for semantic interoperability and text mining

Epilepsy is a multifaceted complex disorder that requires a precise understanding of the classification, diagnosis, treatment and disease mechanism governing it. Although scattered resources are available on epilepsy, comprehensive and structured knowledge is missing. In contemplation to promote multidisciplinary knowledge exchange and facilitate advancement in clinical management, especially in pre-clinical research, a disease-specific ontology is necessary. The presented ontology is designed to enable better interconnection between scientific community members in the epilepsy domain.

The Epilepsy Ontology (EPIO) is an assembly of structured knowledge on various aspects of epilepsy, developed according to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry principles. Concepts and definitions are collected from the latest International League against Epilepsy (ILAE) classification, domain-specific ontologies and scientific literature. This ontology consists of 1879 classes and 28 151 axioms (2171 declaration axioms, 2219 logical axioms) from several aspects of epilepsy. This ontology is intended to be used for data management and text mining purposes.

The current release of the ontology is publicly available under a Creative Commons 4.0 License and shared via http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/epso.owl and is a community-based effort assembling various facets of the complex disease. The ontology is also deposited in BioPortal at https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/EPIO.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics Advances online.