Smith B, Ashburner M, Rosse C, Bard J, Bug W, Ceusters W, Goldberg L J, Eilbeck K, Ireland A, Mungall C J, the OBI Consortium, Leontis N, Rocca-Serra P, Ruttenberg A, Sansone S A, Scheuermann R H, Shah N, Whetzel P L, Lewis S. The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration. Nature Biotechnology 2007;25(11):1251-55.
As the value of data is enhanced by their being in a form that allows them to be integrated with other data, a wide number of “ontologies”, common controlled vocabularies, were created to approach this integration. Unfortunately the proliferation of these “ontologies” became an obstacle itself to integration. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium, pursuing a strategy to overcome this problem, is undergoing a coordinated reform. The result is a new family of ontologies designed to be interoperable and logically well formed and to incorporate accurate representations of biological reality.