An ontology is a computational representation of a domain of knowledgebased upon a controlled, standardized vocabulary for describing entities and the semantic relationships between them. The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) aims to provide a standardized vocabulary of phenotypic abnormalities encountered in human disease. Terms in the HPO describes a phenotypic abnormality, such as atrial septal defect.
The HPO was initially developed using information from Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), which is a hugely important data resource in the field of human genetics and beyond. The HPO is currently being developed using information from OMIM and the medical literature and contains approximately 10,000 terms. Over 50,000 annotations to hereditary diseases are available for download or can be browsed using the PhenExplorer.
The HPO is now being developed in collaboration with members of the OBO Foundry (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies), and logical definitions for HPO terms are being developed using PATO and a number of other ontologies including the FMA, GO, ChEBI, and MPATH. The HPO can be used for clinical diagnostics in human genetics (Phenomizer), bioinformatics research on the relationships between human phenotypic abnormalities and cellular and biochemical networks, for mapping between human and model organism phenotypes, and for providing a standardized vocabulary for clinical databases, among many other things.
The HPO project encourages input from the medical and genetics community with regards to the ontology itself and to clinical annotations.