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DiseaseOntology / SymptomOntology

The symptom ontology was designed around the guiding concept of a symptom being: “A perceived change in function, sensation or appearance reported by a patient indicative of a disease”. Understanding the close relationship of Signs and Symptoms, where Signs are the objective observation of an illness, the Symptom Ontology will work to broaden it’s scope to capture and document in a more robust manor these two sets of terms. Understanding that at times, the same term may be both a Sign and a Symptom. The Symptom Ontology is available under CC0 license (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).
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What is the conceptual difference between SYMP and HPO? #10

Closed matentzn closed 1 year ago

matentzn commented 2 years ago

When people ask OBO about which ontology to use, it would be good if we could give a solid answer. How would you explain to people when they should use HPO vs SYMP? Do you maintaining a mapping between the two? They seem sort of.. the same?

lschriml commented 2 years ago

The DO follows the clinical definitions of phenotype and symptom.

HPO has integrated a number of symptoms over the years. Initially a few dozen, I have not checked lately, but many symptoms are likely now also in HPO. The concept of phenotype has broadened in the HPO to include symptoms and diseases (e.g cancers).

Conceptually, a phenotype and a symptom are not at all the same.

a phenotype: the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment.

a symptom: is a perceived change in function, sensation, loss, disturbance or appearance reported by a patient indicative of a disease. -- symptoms are not the result of genotype and environment interactions -- examples: fever and pain

matentzn commented 2 years ago

Interesting, thank you! I do not know yet what is best here, like maintaining a formal mapping or something; but I was not aware of this distinction of symptom and phenotype. I thought they kinda both mean the same.