Bridging multiple ontologies: Representation of the liver immune response

Chronic liver injury resulting in cirrhosis is the seventh leading cause of disease- related death in the USA. The liver immune response plays a key role in promoting, attenuating, and eventually resolving this severe condition. Although the liver immune response has been extensively investigated by conventional and omic approaches, gaps in knowledge still persist, and there is an urgent need for tools to facilitate the integration and analysis of these large, heterogeneous data sets. While ontologies are now accepted as an essential tool for data integration, no currently available ontology includes a representation of immunological reactions in the context of the liver. To address this need, we propose the Liver Immunology Ontology (LIO). LIO is being developed within the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry framework, importing and linking relevant portions of orthogonal reference ontologies. LIO, is a novel tool for comprehensive analysis of liver immunology data sets, providing a valuable resource for the liver disease research community.