In general we promote the idea of ontology reuse - however in specific cases there might be detailed issues that make a particular reuse instance counterproductive.

This page sets out the criteria for reuse and identifies a number of candidates that may be considered for reuse for the IDMP MVP.

Criteria for Reuse

In order to consider a given ontology for reuse in an ontology, such as an IDMP ontology, that is intended for standardization the following criteria must be met:

1. The ontology must be publicly available and de-referenceable at its IRI (or planned/announced for near-term public release), either by a recognized international standards body, (e.g., ISO, Dublin Core, W3C, OMG, OASIS), or in a well-known ontology repository (such as the OBO Foundry, BioPortal, COLORE (University of Toronto), and the like).
2. The ontology must include a copyright statement and an indication of licensing, which must be open source and non-viral at a minimum. Preference for the MIT or CC by 4 licenses.
3. The ontology must be encoded in the W3C Web Ontology Language and conform with the OWL 2 Description Logics (DL) Profile or a more restrictive profile such as OWL 2 RL (see https://www.w3.org/TR/2012/REC-owl2-quick-reference-20121211/)
4. The ontology must conform with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) policies as described in M.D. Wilkinson , M. Dumontier , Ij.J. Aalbersberg , G. Appleton , M. Axton , A. Baak , … & B. Mons . The FAIR guiding principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific Data 3(2016), 160018. https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618.pdf. and refined in B. Mons , C. Neylon , J. Velterop , M. Dumontier , L.O. Bonino da Silva Santos & M.D. Wilkinson . Cloudy, increasingly FAIR; revisiting the FAIR Data guiding principles for the European Open Science Cloud. Information Services & Use 37 (2017), 49–56. https://content.iospress.com/download/information-services-and-use/isu824?id=information-services-and-use%2Fisu824.
5. The ontology must be well-documented (i.e., every element must have, at a minimum, a human-readable label and definition) and it must be syntactically and logically consistent as demonstrated by at least one well-known reasoner.
6. The ontology must NOT include a default IRI and must include an xml:base IRI.  Many ontologies posted to various repositories and other sites have a default IRI of the Web Ontology Language, for example, and actually modify the OWL language unwittingly. Tools such as Protege have been known to cause this without the knowledge of the authors, particularly in cases where the authors are new to working in OWL. Any ontology that does this is NOT acceptable for reuse in a standard.  If the ontology meets IDMP project requirements from a content perspective as well as the other criteria presented herein, we recommend reaching out to the authors and asking them to fix it.
7. The ontology must be actively maintained by an identifiable and active community of interest.  Any ontology that has not been revised within the last 12-18 months may not meet this requirement.
8. The ontology must be relatively self-contained and must not import any ontology that does not conform to 1-7, above. The ontology may reference, without importing, an ontology that does not conform to the criteria listed in 1-7, but only under limited circumstances and only if approved by the governance team.

These criteria do not provide any constraints on evaluating whether or not the content of an ontology is sufficiently fit for purpose to warrant reuse.  They simply state the absolute minimum criteria that must be met before consideration with respect to the content is appropriate.

Ontologies Considered for Reuse

Reuse Types