The Disease Ontology project was initially developed in 2003 at Northwestern University to address the need for a purpose-built ontology that covers the full spectrum of disease concepts annotated within biomedical repositories within an ontological framework that is extensible to meet community needs.
Disease Ontology Identifiers (DOIDs) consist of the prefix DOID: followed by number, for example, Alzheimer's disease has the stable identifier DOID:10652. DO is cross-referenced in several resources such as UniProt.
Example term
The Disease Ontology entry for motor neuron disease in OBO format is given below, showing the links to other classification schemes, including ICD-9, ICD-10, MeSH, SNOMED and UMLS.
id: DOID:231
name: motor neuron disease
def: "A neurodegenerative disease that is located_in the motor neurones." Motor neuron disease