Ontology-supported research on vaccine efficacy, safety and integrative biological networks

Yongqun He
2014 Expert Review of Vaccines  
While vaccine efficacy and safety research has dramatically progressed with the methods of in silico prediction and data mining, many challenges still exist. A formal ontology is a human-and computer-interpretable set of terms and relations that represent entities in a specific domain and how these terms relate to each other. Several community-based ontologies (including the Vaccine Ontology, Ontology of Adverse Events, and Ontology of Vaccine Adverse Events) have been developed to support
more » ... ne and adverse event representation, classification, data integration, literature mining of host-vaccine interaction networks, and analysis of vaccine adverse events. The author further proposes minimal vaccine information standards and their ontology representations, ontology-based linked open vaccine data and meta-analysis, an integrative One Network ("OneNet") Theory of Life, and ontology-based approaches to study and apply the OneNet theory. In the Big Data era, these proposed strategies provide a novel framework for advanced data integration and analysis of fundamental biological networks including vaccine immune mechanisms.
doi:10.1586/14760584.2014.923762 pmid:24909153 pmcid:PMC4815432 fatcat:t3xq23efsrgyrn5zp3xo2v2dji