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 make a reasonable judgement call on whether or not a given ontology is suitable for reuse in an ontology intended for standardization the following criteria must be met:

1. The ontology must be publicly available and de-referenceable or planned 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 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.
7. The ontology must be relatively self-contained and must not import any ontology that does not conform to 1-6, above. The ontology may reference, without importing, an ontology that does not conform to the criteria listed in 1-6, but only under limited circumstances and only if approved by the governance team.

Ontologies Considered for Reuse

Reuse Types