OBO Foundry in 2021

The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry (http://obofoundry.org) promotes sharing of biomedical ontologies and vocabularies, supporting collaborative ontology development and utilization of ontology design principles. There are over 200 biomedical ontologies in the OBO Library. The OBO Foundry is led by a collective of ontology developers who are committed to collaboration and adherence to shared principles. Collaborative development of ontologies using best practices and principles provides multiple advantages for biocurators. The OBO Foundry promotes consistent identifier use and metadata schemas for its resources and actively maintains a system of permanent URLs for those identifiers. This in turn enables resolution of ontology terms in a web browser for human curators, and provides a standard, computable way of referencing each term. To meet the requirements for inclusion in the OBO Foundry, ontologies must have a contact person and terms should have a clear label, definition, and source of definition (e.g. PubMed ID). The use of consistent identifiers ensures terms never disappear: even if they become obsolete, their identifiers remain valid, allowing curators to find the term corresponding to their annotation. The OBO Foundry’s GitHub-backed website allows ontology editors to directly update the resource information, thus ensuring continual access to the latest information. Developing ontologies that are easily re-usable and compatible with each other is a difficult process. The OBO Foundry principles facilitate this process by introducing shared conventions, such as standard identifiers, recommendations for open licenses, documentation, etc. In our growing community, it is hard to provide concrete development advice to implement these shared principles. This is especially true for new candidate ontologies, whose developers frequently seek advice on how to make their ontology more useful for others. To address this issue, the OBO Foundry developed a suite of tools, such as ROBOT, the Ontology Development Kit, and the OBO Dashboard, that make checking for errors (quality control) and conformance to OBO Foundry principles easier. The OBO Dashboard visually displays the results of OBO principle conformance checks and ROBOT reports, to help identify areas for improvement. The OBO Foundry actively encourages ontology developers to join the community, submit their ontologies for review, and participate in discussions on shaping the Foundry principles.