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The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry is a community of ontology developers committed to a shared set of principles for open, interoperable biomedical ontologies. It runs the OBO registry, the canonical list of member ontologies with their metadata, persistent URLs (PURLs), release products, licenses and contacts, and it reviews ontologies against its principles. When checked on 2026-10-04 the registry listed 267 ontologies, 191 of them active.
| ID | Name | URL | Category | Format | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| obofoundry.registry.yaml | OBO Foundry Registry Metadata (YAML) | ontologies.yml (74.5 KB) | Product | yaml | Machine-readable metadata for every o... |
| obofoundry.registry.jsonld | OBO Foundry Registry Metadata (JSON-LD) | ontologies.jsonld (83.6 KB) | Product | jsonld | OBO registry ontology metadata serial... |
| obofoundry.registry.ttl | OBO Foundry Registry Metadata (Turtle) | ontologies.ttl (524.8 KB) | Product | ttl | OBO registry ontology metadata serial... |
| obofoundry.portal | OBO Foundry Website | obofoundry.org | Graphical Interface | http | OBO Foundry website with a browsable ... |
| obofoundry.principles | OBO Foundry Principles | fp-000-summary.html | Documentation | http | Summary of the OBO Foundry principles... |
| obofoundry.repository | OBO Foundry GitHub Repository | OBOFoundry.github.io | Product | mixed | GitHub repository holding the OBO reg... |
| ID | Name | URL | Category | Format | Relation | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bioportal.portal | BioPortal Portal | bioportal.bioontology.org | Graphical Interface | http | was derived from | Web portal for searching, browsing, a... |
| bioportal.api | BioPortal REST API | data.bioontology.org | Programming Interface | http | was derived from | REST API for ontology concepts, searc... |
| bioregistry.registry.json | Bioregistry JSON Export | registry.json (768.2 KB) | Product | json | was influenced by | Full Bioregistry export as JSON, with... |
| bioregistry.sssom | Bioregistry SSSOM Mappings | bioregistry.sssom.tsv (133.1 KB) | Mapping | sssom | was influenced by | SSSOM mappings between Bioregistry pr... |
| ols.json | OLS Ontologies JSON | latest | Product | json | was derived from | Gzipped tar archive (ontology_jsons.t... |
| ols.json-linked | OLS Linked Ontology JSON | latest | Product | json | was derived from | Gzipped tar archive (ontology_jsons_l... |
The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry is a collective of ontology developers who agree to follow shared principles so that their ontologies interoperate. It began in 2007 and is coordinated by an Operations Committee with working groups for editorial review, technical infrastructure and outreach.
The OBO registry is the list of member ontologies. Each ontology has an entry with its id prefix, title, description, homepage, PURLs for its release products, license, contact and activity status. The registry is maintained on GitHub and exported as YAML, JSON-LD and Turtle at https://obofoundry.org/registry/. Many downstream services, such as the Ontology Lookup Service, BioPortal and the Bioregistry, load or align with this metadata.
When checked on 2026-10-04 the registry listed 267 ontologies, 191 marked active.
Member ontologies are expected to follow the OBO principles, which cover open licensing, a common format, a unique identifier space, versioning, textual definitions, documented scope and use of the shared relations ontology. The OBO Dashboard reports automated checks against these principles.
In KG-Registry, OBO Foundry ontologies carry the obo-foundry collection tag.
Created: October 04, 2026 | Last modified: October 04, 2026