VO: The Vaccine Ontology

Vaccines are widely used in both research and clinical settings. To facilitate FAIR data practices, we urgently need to standardize vaccine representation, integrate information across diverse vaccine types, and support computer-assisted reasoning. Accordingly, we have since 2007 developed the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO), which aligns with the Basic Formal Ontology and adheres to OBO Foundry principles. VO ontologically models vaccines, vaccine components, vaccine immune responses, vaccine investigation studies and other vaccine-related topics. VO represents more than 10,000 vaccines targeting 289 infectious pathogens and cancers in humans and over 30 nonhuman animal species. VO provides mappings to external resources such as RxNorm, CVX, FDA, and USDA. VO facilitates vaccine standardization in resources such as the VIOLIN vaccine database, ImmPort, and the Vaccine Adjuvant Compendium (VAC). VO enables semantic queries on vaccine data. It has been shown to enhance the analysis of experimental and clinical vaccine datasets, as well as vaccine-related literature mining. Overall, VO standardizes vaccine modeling and representation and greatly supports vaccine AI research in the Semantic Web era.