It is now generally accepted that wherever we need to address multiple different kinds of data deriving from multiple different kinds of sources, a strategy is required to ensure interoperability across the various systems involved. The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) is developing an ontology for use in their knowledge management platform-the Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO). The UNEP approach to achieving interoperability is modeled on the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry, an initiative of ontology developers working in a range of life science domains who have been working since 2004 to develop a suite of ontologies which would work together consistently in such a way as to advance the integration of data [1]. To serve such integration the OBO Foundry members formulated and tested an evolving set of principles for ontology development which are now being used by ontology developers also in other areas, including manufacturing, geology, transport and security.
II. OBO PRINCIPLES1
1. OPEN: Each ontology in the Foundry must be openly
available to be used by all without any constraint other
than (a) its origin must be acknowledged and (b) it is not
to be altered and subsequently redistributed in altered form
under the original name or with the same identifiers.
2. COMMON FORMAT: The ontology is made available in a
common formal language in an accepted concrete syntax,
for example OWL.
3. IDENTIFIER SPACE: Each class and relation (property) in
the ontology must have a unique URI identifier. The URI
should be constructed from a base URI, a prefix that is
unique within the Foundry (e.g. GO, CHEBI, CL) and a
local identifier (e.g. 0000001). The local identifier should
not consist of labels or mnemonics meaningful to humans.
The ID-space / prefix must be registered with the OBO
library in advance.
1 http://obofoundry.org/principles/fp-000-summary.html
† corresponding author
unit level (class and relations)). Documentation
assessment with the purpose of assessing Ontology
soundness, will cover updates and revision to the
documentation. As ontology evolve, so should the
documentation, for example by including a release
documentation file.
8. PLURALITY OF USERS: The ontology developers should
document that the ontology is used by multiple
independent individuals or organizations. For purposes of
documentation, the ontology developers should provide
links/citations to evidence of use (publication, external
ontology; see examples below) as input to the review
process.
9. COMMITMENT TO COLLABORATION: OBO Foundry
ontology development, in common with many other
standards-oriented scientific activities, should be carried
out in a collaborative fashion. The benefits of
collaboration are threefold: (
OBO Foundry member and candidate ontologies (such as OBI, CHEBI, ENVO) serve as an important input to the SDGIO development process. In my presentation I shall focus on principle 6, TEXTUAL DEFINITIONS, and show how the definition practices used in the OBO Foundry are being applied to definitions for many upper-level terms needed to build the SDGIO, such as ‘access’, ‘right’, ‘resilience’, and ‘vulnerability’, as illustrated in Figure 1.