Major Ontologies/Thesauruses

BARTOC, Basic Register of Thesauri, Ontologies & Classifications

Many ontologies, thesauri and classifications are listed on BARTOC.

BARTOC also lists other registries

• Offer an Extensive API

Life Science

Ontology Lookup Service

Most ontologies for life sciences are listed by the Ontology Lookup Service.

As such, we will list only the major one here. Feel free to contact us (via a GitHub issue for instance) if you think one should be listed here.

• Offer an Extensive API

BioPortal, Biomedical Repository

Similarly, most biomedical ontologies are listed on BioPortal

• Offer an Extensive API

Major Ontologies

• Gene Ontology, provides consistent descriptions of gene products across species.

• Protein Ontology (PRO), describes protein forms and relationships between them

• Plant Ontology (PO), provides structured vocabularies for plant anatomy and development

• Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), offers a standard vocabulary for phenotypic abnormalities in humans

• Cell Ontology (CL), classifies cell types in animals

• Sequence Ontology (SO), provides terms to describe biological sequence features

• Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), standardizes terminology for the description of life science and clinical investigations

For Health & Medical Sciences

• Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), represents a reference ontology for human anatomy

• National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIT), contains terms for cancers and related diseases

• ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases), used for health statistics, diagnosis, and reimbursement codes

• RXNorm, provides normalized names for clinical drugs

For Environmental & Ecological Sciences

Community Ontology Repository

The Community Ontology Repository lists the Ontologies for Earth Sciences

Major Ontologies

• EnvO (Environment Ontology), describes environments for use in ecology and environmental health

• EOL (Encyclopedia of Life), a comprehensive reference for all known species of life on Earth

• GEMET (General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus). a thesaurus covering environmental terms

• Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET), provides a highly expressive suite of ontologies for Earth sciences

For Chemistry & Chemical Sciences

• ChEBI (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest), focuses on ‘small’ chemical compounds

• ChEMBL, manages chemical information, including bioactive compounds

• Chemical Information Ontology (CHEMINF), describes chemical information and data formats

For Astronomy & Space Sciences

• Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT), a modern and open thesaurus for the astronomy community

For Social Sciences

• Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), a top-level ontology framework used across many domains including social sciences

For Physics

• Physical Quantities and Units Ontology (QUDT), for physical quantities, units of measure, and associated standards

For Engineering

• MDO (Materials Domain Ontology), “An Ontology for the Materials Design Domain”

Generalist

• Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), provides a standard for resource description and discovery on the web