Open Biomedical Ontologies
Open Biomedical Ontologies (abbreviated OBO; 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 U.S. National Center for Biomedical Ontology where it will form a central element of the NCBO's BioPortal.
The OBO Ontology library forms the basis of the OBO Foundry, a collaborative experiment involving a group of ontology developers who have agreed in advance to the adoption of a growing set of principles specifying best practices in ontology development. These principles are designed to foster interoperability of ontologies within the broader OBO framework and also to ensure a gradual improvement of quality and formal rigor in ontologies. The library operates to design ways to meet the increasing needs of data and information integration in the biomedical domain.
The Ontology Lookup Service is a spin-off of the PRIDE project, which required a centralized query interface for ontology and controlled vocabulary lookup. While many of the ontologies queriable by the OLS are available online, each has its own query interface and output format. The OLS provides a web service interface to query multiple ontologies from a single location with a unified output format.
Gene Ontology Consortium
The goal of the Gene Ontology (GO) consortium is to produce a controlled vocabulary that can be applied to all organisms even as knowledge of gene and protein roles in cells is accumulating and changing. GO provides three structured networks of defined terms to describe gene product attributes.
The Sequence Ontology (SO) is a part of the Gene Ontology project and the aim is to develop an ontology suitable for describing biological sequences. It is a joint effort by genome annotation centres, including WormBase, the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, FlyBase, the Mouse Genome Informatics group, and the Sanger Institute.
Generic Model Organism Databases
The Generic Model Organism Project (GMOD) is a joint effort by the model organism system databases WormBase, FlyBase, MGI, SGD, Gramene, Rat Genome Database, EcoCyc, and TAIR to develop reusable components suitable for creating new community databases of biology.
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