The mission of the OBO Foundry is to develop a family of interoperable ontologies that are both logically well-formed and scientifically accurate. To achieve this, OBO Foundry participants follow and contribute to the development of an evolving set of principles including open use, collaborative development, non-overlapping and strictly-scoped content, and common syntax and relations, based on ontology models that work well, such as the Gene Ontology (GO).

The OBO Foundry is overseen by an Operations Committee with Editorial, Technical and Outreach working groups.