ABSTRACT
Objective China has the biggest population of commonly encountered liver diseases , so hepatology resear-ches are of great importance to human health .In order to comprehensively collect/organize and effectively share/display liv-er physiopathology knowledge scattered around databases and literature , a Human Liver Disease Ontology ( HuLDO ) is built and applied in many ways .Methods HuLDO systematically classified and annotated various human liver diseases based on extensive cross mapping and integration of several authoritative nomenclatures of diseases and two monographs of hepatology .Results In the present version , HuLDO encompassed knowledge of 227 human liver diseases and was enriched by plenty of synonyms,definitions, descriptions, references, and logical or pathological relations between different disea-ses.Compared with other existing nomenclatures , HuLDO extended far beyond them in the scope of liver diseases .Several applications of HuLDO in database construction , knowledge collection and text mining were also described .Conclusion HuLDO offers a sound basis for knowledge mining , data integration and data analysis in the field of hepatology .HuLDO is publicly available at ftp://liveratlas.hupo.org.cn/5.liver 5.liver%20Disease%20Ontology/.