ISPO is an integrated symptom phenotype ontology that could be used for both Chinese clinical data analysis and biomedical data mining on symptom phenotypes. The construction of ISPO would enhance the semantic interoperability among heterogeneous medical data sources and clinical decision support systems.

The construction of ISPO was started from 2018 involving the efforts from around 20 medical researchers. By integrating 78,696 inpatient cases of EMRs, 5 biomedical controlled vocabularies, 21 TCM books and dictionaries, ISPO provides 3,147 concepts, 23,475 terms, and 55,552 definition or contextual texts. Adhering to the taxonomical structure of the related anatomical systems of symptom phenotypes, ISPO provides 12 top-level categories and 79 middle-level sub-categories. ISPO is completely manually constructed by clinical or biomedical informatics researchers to ensure the quality of ontology.

To facilitate the concept mapping task, we developed a web editing tool named Medical Concept Structure and Relationship Processing System (MCSR-PS). MCSR-PS is a multi-user collaborative terminology processing and management system. MCSR-PS can import EXCEL, CSV, and other types of files for terminology processing, and realize the operation of adding, deleting, and automatic coding of instances, which greatly shortens the terminology processing time for our task.

It is publicly available through the Bioportal at https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/ISPO/.