OBO Foundry

The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry (now The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry) is a collaborative experiment involving developers of science-based ontologies. (Smith et al., 2007) The Foundry is concerned with establishing a set of principles for ontology development with the goal of creating a suite of orthogonal interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain. The Foundry approach has been adopted by the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) Standard and by the cROP (Common Reference Ontologies for Plants) initiatives.

The Foundry initiative rests on the belief that the value of data is greatly enhanced when it exists in a form that allows it to be integrated with other data. One approach to integration is through the annotation of multiple bodies of data using common controlled vocabularies. Ideally, such controlled vocabularies take the form of 'ontologies', which means that they are constructed in such a way as to support logical reasoning over the data annotated in their terms.

The success of this general approach in helping to tame the explosive proliferation of data in the biomedical domain—most conspicuously through the work of the Gene Ontology Consortium—has led to the development of certain proposed principles of good practice in ontology development, which are now being put into practice within the framework of the Open Biomedical Ontologies consortium through its OBO Foundry initiative. Existing OBO ontologies, including the Gene Ontology, are undergoing coordinated reform and new ontologies are being created in a coordinated effort to create a family of ontologies designed to be interoperable and logically well formed and to incorporate accurate representations of biological reality.

The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (formerly The Open Biomedical Ontologies as well as The Open Biological Ontologies) is an effort to create controlled vocabularies for shared use across different biological and medical domains. As of 2006, OBO ontologies form part of the resources of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, where they form a central component of the NCBO's BioPortal.

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