The Sickle Cell Disease Ontology (SCDO) project was originally a collaboration between H3ABioNet (Pan African Bioinformatics Network) and SPAN (Sickle Cell Disease Pan African Network), but is now maintained and extended by the Sickle Africa Data Coordinating Centre (SADaCC), with contributions from members of the SickleInAfrica Consortium’s SCDO Working Group.

The purpose of the SCDO is to:

• establish community standardized Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) terms and descriptions.
• establish canonical and hierarchical representation of knowledge on SCD.
• link to other ontologies and bodies of work such as DO, PhenX, MeSH, ICD, NCI’s thesaurus, SNOMED and OMIM.

We anticipate the SCDO will:

• be the most comprehensive collection of knowledge in the SCD field.
• facilitate exploration of new scientific questions and ideas.
• facilitate seamless data sharing and collaborations including meta-analysis within the SDC community.
• support the building of databasing and clinical informatics in SCD.