Developing a Specialized Dravet Syndrome Ontology for Rare Disease Informatics and AI Applications
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Dravet syndrome (DS) is a severe developmental and epileptic encephalopathy whose clinical and research representation requires integration of heterogeneous knowledge spanning seizures, development, behavior, SUDEP/autonomic risk, genetics, comorbidities, electrophysiology, pharmacology, and drug responsiveness. We report the development of a DS-focused ontology created by expert-guided specialization of a previously published epilepsy ontology. Scope expansion was defined through a scientific advisory board, structured review meetings, and iterative ontology curation in OWL. The resulting resource reorganized DS content across nine major domains and expanded the publicly released ontology from the pre-extension baseline to the current BioPortal version. Beyond structural growth, the ontology was assessed through expert-guided curation and downstream task-based reuse, including two published ontology-enabled LLM studies and an ongoing ontology-derived DS knowledge graph and AI assistant platform. These results suggest that disease-focused ontology specialization can provide durable infrastructure for DS data harmonization, knowledge representation, and AI-enabled translational informatics.
