OBO Foundry

This page provides guidance for filling out the fields in the GitHub issue tracker, which is step 2 of this simple list of steps to submit your ontology for consideration. With the exception of the “Additional comments” question, all fields are required.

Note that joining the OBO Foundry includes a commitment to follow Foundry principles. In addition to obtaining basic information about your ontology, the questions are meant to highlight these principles, describe our expectations, and assess your commitment to joining the OBO Foundry. The answers also help us identify the right person to review your request.

Please see this guide for detailed instructions about requesting a PURL.

Please review the OBO Foundry Principles before proceeding with this submission

Ontology title

Concise title of your ontology (e.g, “Gene Ontology”)

Requested ID space

Prefix of ontology in lowercase (e.g., bfo, uberon, chebi, pato). The OBO Foundry ID policy is described here. Specifically, please see the guidelines for allocating IDSPACEs. Note that ontology prefixes should have at least 4 letters, though you will see older ontologies with 2 or 3-letter prefixes.

Ontology location

Home page or URL of ontology. This can be a GitHub URL.

Contact person

Name, email address, and GitHub username of contact person. The OBO Foundry policy on contact person is described here.

Issue tracker

URL for submitting and responding to suggestions, requests, etc. (e.g., https://github.com/geneontology/go-ontology/issues/).

Ontology license

Current license. Note that the OBO Foundry accepts CC0 or CC-BY. The OBO Foundry license policy is described in Principle 1, Open Licensing.

Available ontology formats

Note that OWL-RDF/XML is the only required format. The OBO Foundry format policy is described in Principle 2.

What domain is the ontology intended to cover?

For example, the GO covers the processes, functions and cellular locations of gene products. The OBO Foundry policy on scope of an ontology is described in Principle 5.

What other ontologies are you aware of that intersect with your domain, and what are your plans for collaborating with them? The OBO Foundry policy on collaboration is described in Principle 10, Collaboration.

Intended use/related projects

Is your ontology serving the need of one or more specific projects? If so, please describe them. The OBO Foundry policy on documented users is described in Principle 9.

Data source

Which resources, if any, were used to generate the ontology? E.g., NCBITaxon was created from the NCBI taxonomy resource; the Protein Ontology uses, in part, UniProtKB.

Additional comments or remarks

Any other significant information that you’d like us to know.

New Ontology Submission Instructions