The BioCaster Ontology (BCO) aims to (a) describe the terms and relations necessary to detect and risk assess public health events in the grey literature at an early stage; (b) bridge the gap between the (multilingual) grey literature and existing standards in biomedicine; (c) to be open source and freely available for general usage.

In contrast to other ontologies that describe infectious diseases, the BCO focusses on the usage of terms and relations within informal unstructured reports which are often made at a pre-diagnostic stage of a disease outbreak by non-medically trained reporters. This is done to provide monitoring and early warning about public health hazards from online media reports. An example of its usage can be seen in the BioCaster Global Health Monitor at http://born.nii.ac.jp.

The ontology is constantly evolving and we welcome feedback. The BCO is maintained by Dr. Nigel Collier's group at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo with the collaboration of partners in the international life science and computational linguistics communities.

The canonical publication for Version 3 (2010) of the BCO is:

Collier, N., Matsuda Goodwin, R., McCrae, J., Doan, S., Kawazoe, A., Conway, M., Kawtrakul, A., Takeuchi, K. and Dien, D. (2010), "An ontology-driven system for detecting global health events", Proc. 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Beijing, China, August 23-27, pp.215-222, available from http://aclweb.org/anthology/C/C10/C10-1025.pdf

The canonical publication for Version 2 (2008) is:

Collier, N., Kawazoe, A., Jin, L., Shigematsu, M., Dien, D. Barrero, R., Takeuchi , K.and Kawtrakul, A. (2006), “A multilingual ontology for infectious disease surveillance: rationale, design and challenges”, Language Resources and Evaluation, 40(3-4): 405-413, Springer Netherlands, DOI: 10.1007/s10579-007-9019-7, available from http://www.springerlink.com/content/q6443823n6555448/