About the OBO Foundry

The mission of the OBO Foundry is to develop a family of interoperable ontologies that are both logically well-formed and scientifically accurate. To achieve this, OBO Foundry participants follow and contribute to the development of an evolving set of principles including open use, collaborative development, non-overlapping and strictly-scoped content, and common syntax and relations, based on ontology models that work well, such as the Gene Ontology (GO).

The OBO Foundry is overseen by an Operations Committee with Editorial, Technical and Outreach working groups.

You can contribute to the OBO Foundry by submitting issues or pull requests to our GitHub repo, OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io, or by joining our mailing list https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/obo-discuss. If you'd like to submit your ontology for possible inclusion in the OBO Foundry, please follow the instructions here.

An overview of the OBO Foundry can be found in these publications: The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration and OBO Foundry in 2021: operationalizing open data principles to evaluate ontologies. See also this OBO tutorial.