=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3939/abstract1
|storemode=property
|title=OLS4: New Features for Exploring Ontologies
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3939/abstract1.pdf
|volume=Vol-3939
|authors=Haider Iqbal,James McLaughlin,Helen Parkinson,Henriette Harmse
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icbo/IqbalMPH24
}}
==OLS4: New Features for Exploring Ontologies==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3939/abstract1.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
                                OLS4: New Features for Exploring Ontologies -
                                Abstract
                                Haider Iqbal1,†, James McLaughlin1,†, Helen Parkinson1,† and Henriette Harmse1,∗, †
                                1
                                European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, CB10 1SD,
                                United Kingdom.



                                        Abstract
                                        The Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) is an open-source search engine for ontologies, utilised within
                                        the bioinformatics community for annotating biological and biomedical data with Findable, Accessible,
                                        Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) ontology terms. Since OLS3, the ontology landscape has expanded,
                                        with the number of indexed ontologies growing from 158 in 2016 to 251 in 2023. We have developed
                                        OLS4 from the ground up to address the latest advancements in ontology authoring and support the
                                        community’s future needs. OLS4 includes several new features to enable ontology exploration and anno-
                                        tation capabilities. Annotations on annotations, a feature that enriches terms with detailed provenance
                                        information, are now supported. Cross-ontology linking enables users to see which ontologies define
                                        each term. This gives users a clearer context and relationships of terms across different ontologies.
                                        OLS4 provides additional data enrichment, such as associating names with ORCID identifiers to allow
                                        curators and editors to tag terms with their authorship. OLS4 now supports the full rendering of all
                                        OWL 2 axioms on the frontend, empowering users with a deeper understanding of their ontologies,
                                        and displaying relationships such as disjointness between terms. Before OLS4, one of the major pain
                                        points faced by our users was the prolonged duration required for their ontologies to be reflected in OLS.
                                        We have re-engineered the data-load pipeline to address this, substantially improving the data update
                                        process. Users can now access the latest versions of all OBO Foundry and EBI-defined ontologies within
                                        48 hours. In addition to these technical enhancements, OLS4 embraces a global user community with
                                        multi-language support, ensuring that ontology exploration is more accessible to a diverse audience.
                                        OLS4 maintains a backwards-compatible API to ensure a seamless transition for existing users and is
                                        now operational at EMBL-EBI (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols) replacing OLS3 in production.

                                        Keywords
                                        ontology, visualisation, owl, classes




                                15th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies 2024, July 17-19, 2024, Enschede, The Netherlands
                                ∗
                                    Corresponding author.
                                †
                                    These authors contributed equally.
                                Envelope-Open haideri@ebi.ac.uk (H. Iqbal); jmcl@ebi.ac.uk (J. McLaughlin); parkinso@ebi.ac.uk (H. Parkinson);
                                henriette007@ebi.ac.uk (H. Harmse)
                                GLOBE https://www.embl.org/people/person/CP-60025972/ (H. Iqbal);
                                https://www.embl.org/people/person/CP-60034035/ (J. McLaughlin);
                                https://www.embl.org/people/person/CP-60002372/ (H. Parkinson);
                                https://www.embl.org/people/person/CP-60030719/ (H. Harmse)
                                Orcid 0000-0003-0766-7425 (H. Iqbal); 0000-0002-8361-2795 (J. McLaughlin); 0000-0003-3035-4195 (H. Parkinson);
                                0000-0001-7251-9504 (H. Harmse)
                                         © 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).




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