Genomic Nosology for Medicine (GNOMED)

In the mid 1700s, Carl Linnaeus devised the binomial nomenclature to classify living things into a hierarchy, or taxonomy. Our modern day use of DNA sequencing has enabled the reorganization of the position of species within established taxonomical trees by providing a quantitative distance measure between species. Linnaeus was also a co-founder of systematic nosology, or the classification of disease. We hypothesize that genomic data, medical knowledge, and structured vocabularies have advanced to the point that we can begin to modernize the classification of disease, similar to how DNA sequencing has modernized taxonomy.