The BLO set
The BLO set is a collection of freely available ontologies about human blood, currently composed by four complementary sub-ontologies covering several aspects of activities and reasearch on blood.
BLO-Core
BLO-Core focuses on physiological aspects of the blood and presents the basic information required to work on hematological research and practice. The ontology provides the essentials of the chemical subjects (DNA and RNA chemistry, DNA and RNA structure, genes and chromosomes, proteins, amino-acids, bases, enzymes, vectors, and so forth) and of the molecular, immunologic and cellular basis of blood (hematopoiesis, kinds and functions of blood cells, homeostasis, and so forth), as well as blood disorders, malignances, and transplantation.
BLO-Management
The BLO-Management covers the relevant processes involved in blood manipulation and related services. This part of the BLO is essentially process-oriented and aims to represent the myriad of processes and events that compose the field of Hemotherapy.The blood manipulation involves primarily the following activities: i) quality systems; ii) blood utilization management; iii) donor selection; iv) blood collection; v) control of transfusions; vi) control of apheresis; vii) blood testing; viii) use of molecular techniques; ix) detection of antigen-antibody reactions; and x) blood transfusion. These activities involve a range of processes that were considered in the design of BLO.
BLO-Products
The BLO-Products ontology aims to face the challenges created by a multitude of possible “product” derivates of blood manipulation, which could be managed on a worldwide scale. A suitable description based on standardized labels allows to identify blood products at any site to where they could be moved. While there are patterns to labeling, there is no approach following ontological principles.
BLO-Administrative
The BLO-Administrative ontology aims to cover the issues related to the official documentation of interest to blood banks and transfusion services. By “documentation”, we mean policies, documents from regulatory agencies, documents from trade associations professional’s class associations, legislation, regulations, classification systems, and standards. BLO-Administrative goes beyond the simple consideration of objects and process, to reach the realm of human purposes expressed in documents. It has being designed in line with the developments with the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO).
