OLS4: a new Ontology Lookup Service for a growing interdisciplinary knowledge ecosystem.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40323307.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaf279 and PMC identifier 12094816.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) is an open source search engine for ontologies which is used extensively in the bioinformatics and chemistry communities to annotate biological and biomedical data with ontology terms. Recently, there has been a significant increase in the size and complexity of ontologies due to new scales of biological knowledge, such as spatial transcriptomics, new ontology development methodologies, and curation on an increased scale. Existing Web-based tools for ontology browsing such as BioPortal and OntoBee do not support the full range of definitions used by today's ontologies. In order to support the community going forward, we have developed OLS4, implementing the complete OWL2 specification, internationalization support for multiple languages, and a new user interface with UX enhancements such as links out to external databases. OLS4 has replaced OLS3 in production at EMBL-EBI and has a backward compatible API supporting users of OLS3 to transition. The source code of OLS is available at https://github.com/EBISPOT/ols4 and DOI 10.5281/zenodo.14960290 with Apache 2.0 License. A freely available implementation is accessible at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols4.
Medical subject headings
- Biological Ontologies
- Software
- Computational Biology
- Search Engine