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Information About

Obo Foundry




A subset of ontologies in the Open Biomedical Ontologies library that fulfil certain criteria. OBO Foundry ontologies strive to be orthogonal with respect to one another, and use relations from the OBO Relations Ontology


INTRODUCTION


Open Biomedical Ontologies (formerly Open Biological Ontologies) is an effort to create controlled vocabularies for shared use across different biological and medical domains. As of 2006, OBO forms part of the resources of the National Center For Biomedical Ontology , where it will form a central element of the NCBO's BioPortal.

The OBO Foundry is a collaborative experiment, involving a group of OBO ontology developers who have agreed in advance to the adoption of a growing set of principles specifying best practices in ontology development. The goal is to develop a set interoperable gold standard reference ontologies for all major domains of biomedical research.


CUSTODIANS


The custodians of the OBO Foundry are:


PRINCIPLES


(Version as of 24 April 2006.)

1. The ontology is open and available to be used by all without any constraint other than (1) its origin must be acknowledged and (2) it is not to be altered and subsequently redistributed under the original name or with the same identifiers.

2. The ontology is in, or can be expressed in, a common formal language. (A provisional list of languages supported by OBO is provided at http://obo.sf.net/.)

3. The ontology possesses a unique identifier space within OBO.

4. The ontology provider has procedures for identifying distinct successive versions.

5. The ontology has a clearly specified and clearly delineated content.

6. The ontology includes textual definitions for all terms.

7. The ontology uses relations which are unambiguously defined following the pattern of definitions laid down in the OBO Relation Ontology .

8. The ontology is well-documented.

9. The ontology has a plurality of independent users.

10. The ontologies in the OBO Foundry will be developed in a collaborative effort.


INITIAL CANDIDATE MEMBERS OF THE OBO FOUNDRY


GO Gene Ontology

CL Cell Ontology

SO Sequence Ontology

ChEBI Chemical Ontology

PATO Phenotype Ontology

FuGO Functional Genomics Investigation Ontology

FMA Foundational Model of Anatomy

RO Relation Ontology