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Rare disorders are scarcely represented in international classifications and therefore invisible in information systems. One of the major needs in health information systems and for research is to share and/or to integrate data coming from heterogeneous sources with diverse reference terminologies. ORPHANET (www.orpha.net) is a multilingual information portal on rare diseases and orphan drugs. Orphanet information system is supported by a relational database built around the concept of rare disorders. Representation of rare diseases in Orphanet encompasses levels of increasing complexity: lexical (multilingual terminology), nosological (multihierarchical classifications), relational (annotations—epidemiological data—and classes of objects—genes, manifestations, and orphan drugs—integrated in a relational database), and interoperational (semantic interoperability). Rare disorders are mapped to …