Published December 11, 2013 | Version v1
Journal article Open

The environment ontology: contextualising biological and biomedical entities

  • 1. HGF-MPG Research Group on Deep-Sea Ecology and Technology, Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Am Handelshafen 12, Bremerhaven 27570, Germany
  • 2. School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
  • 3. Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150, USA
  • 4. Genomics Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

Description

As biological and biomedical research increasingly reference the environmental context of the biological entities
under study, the need for formalisation and standardisation of environment descriptors is growing. The
Environment Ontology (ENVO; www.environmentontology.org) is a community-led, open project which seeks to
provide an ontology for specifying a wide range of environments relevant to multiple life science disciplines and,
through an open participation model, to accommodate the terminological requirements of all those needing to
annotate data using ontology classes. This paper summarises ENVO’s motivation, content, structure, adoption, and
governance approach. The ontology is available from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/envo.owl - an OBO format
version is also available by switching the file suffix to “obo”.

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Additional details

Funding

European Commission
MICRO B3 - Marine Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics and Biotechnology 287589