Related Links

Presentations

J. Hunter, "Building a Metadata Schema and Ontology Registry for the Australian eResearch Community", 11th Annual Metadata Open Forum, Sydney, 19-22 May, 2008

Other projects

There are a number of existing ontology repositories and initiatives to create such, some of which have similar features. Following are lists of a few of them, one for general purpose repositories, one for repositories specific to a discipline. These lists are by no means complete, if you want to see another repository listed feel free to contact us so we can add it to the list.

Some descriptions start with citations of a project's website. In this case the font is slightly altered to highlight the cited part.

General purpose repositories

The DAML ontology library: A library of ontologies accessible by various lists. There is no search interface as such, but the different dimensions can be accessed by a list for each of them. The metadata is available in XML and DAML formats.
The Finish Ontology Library service (ONKI): ONKI ontology library service contains ontologies (including vocabularies and thesauri) used in Finnish on a national level, and services for creating, publishing, and using them cost-efficiently.
Its main interface is a directory view, it has an ontology browser integrated and allows searching particular ontologies (the search code can be generated for use in other sites). It integrates a MediaWiki for describing the ontologies in detail.
SchemaWeb: SchemaWeb is a directory of RDF schemas expressed in the RDFS, OWL and DAML+OIL schema languages.
It has a very simple data model without versioning support. The standard search interface is very simple, but it also allows querying the RDF content by matching a single triple.
The Ontology Lookup Service (OLS): 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 has an integrated ontology browser and has a search interface that dynamically fetches all term (class) names that match the text entered by the user. The ontologies are stored in the Sourceforge infrastructure used by the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry (see below).
The Open Ontology Repository (OOR): The OOR Initiative intends to establish a hosted registry-repository, enable and facilitate open, federated, collaborative ontology repositories, and establish best practices for expressing interoperable ontology and taxonomoy work in registry-repositories [rephrased from their description]. At the time of writing there is no released product yet, but they have a development site.

Discipline-specific repositories

The BioPortal repository of biomedical ontologies: A feature-rich ontology repository created as part of the US' National Centers for Biomedical Computing effort. It supports OWL, OBOF and Protege formats and it manages multiple versions of an ontology. It comes with an embedded Flash-based viewer for the ontologies and it has support for comment, notes and mappings on the class-level. Projects can be modeled as additional entities in the system. Search is very basic compared to the features of Pronto.
The MMI Ontology Registry for marine science: A repository targetted at marine metadata based on the BioPortal product listed above. To our knowledge it has the same features as the original.
The Open Biomedical Ontologies: The OBO Foundry is a collaborative experiment involving developers of science-based ontologies who are 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 main access is a list of ontologies with some basic metadata. Versioning is not handle as part of the data model, but ontologies are stored in a CVS repository hosted as part of the underlying Sourceforge project, which is also use to provide mailing lists and issue tracking for the ontologies stored. The site manages mappings between ontologies as separate entities and it also has a long list of related publications.
The Plant Ontology Consortium: The main objective of the Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is to develop, curate and share controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe plant structures and growth and developmental stages, providing a semantic framework for meaningful cross-species queries across databases.
The website has a search interface that allows searching for terms, synonyms and other structured data. There is a browse interface using an HTML tree view as well as generated images for parts of the class hierarchies. The file format used is the OBO format and files are managed in a CVS repository. Changemanagement is done as part of the Sourceforge project for the OBO foundry.