An Overview of Biomedical Ontologies for Pandemics and Infectious Diseases Representation

Several infectious diseases and pandemics have so far emerged. Pandemics are by nature rapidly evolving. In this context, COVID-19 cases, seen recently in a growing number of countries around the world, have been increasing exponentially. So, researchers and responsible actors should take quick decisions to mitigate the spread of such diseases. To do so, several computer science solutions, including ontologies, have been proposed to cope with these issues and save humanity. The ontology is the key formalism which allows modelling knowledge along with its semantics in a formal way. Indeed, the ontology provides unambiguous definitions of a discourse’s domain terms in a machine understandable way. Particularly, biomedical ontologies have ever been developed to capture and represent pandemics and infectious diseases. In this context, this paper aims to scrutinize and study these state-of-the-art ontologies.