MIDO: Mycosis (Fungal) Infectious Disease Ontology
MIDO is an open-source biomedical ontology. It is developed to provide standardized human- and computer-interpretable annotation and representation of various fungal infectious diseases. Its development follows the OBO Foundry Principles.
MIDO aims to bring fungal infectious diseases in conversation with other OBO Foundry ontologies and extensions related to infectious diseases. MIDO is itself a reference ontology that extends the Infectious Disease Ontology, much like the Virus Infectious Disease Ontology and Bacteria Infectious Disease Ontology. Fungal pathogens are often opportunistic in nature, so creating clear relationships with other infectious disease ontologies is important in detecting and studying deadly secondary fungal infections and in identifying people with weakened immune systems, either due to illness or treatment, that are at an increased risk of contracting fungal infections.
More on the unique challenges hospitals face diagnosing and treating fungal infections: Diagnostic Mycology: Xtreme Challenges
In light of ongoing discussions regarding terminology and taxonomy within the clinical microbiology community, MIDO imports the UNITE Community database to define different types of fungi. UNITE is an open-source database created and maintained by mycologists, which provides a novel taxon and species hypothesis approach combined with digitial object identifiers (DOIs), and it synthesizes a number of different classification schemes. UNITE provides traceable communication of taxa and their properties so that new understandings can be easily communicated and integrated. More information on UNITE here: The Taxon Hypothesis Paradigm—On the Unambiguous Detection and Communication of Taxa
Sydney Cohen, [email protected]