Ontology Development Kit: a toolkit for building, maintaining, and standardising biomedical ontologies

TL;DR

The Ontology Development Kit (ODK) offers a standardized, automated toolkit within a Docker environment to streamline biomedical ontology development, maintenance, and standardization, enhancing interoperability and quality control.

Contribution

This paper introduces the ODK, a comprehensive toolkit that consolidates ontology workflows and tools into a single, customizable platform to improve biomedical ontology management.

Findings

Provides a unified, automated workflow for ontology development.

Facilitates standardization and quality control in biomedical ontologies.

Supports community-driven interoperability efforts.

Abstract

Similar to managing software packages, managing the ontology life cycle involves multiple complex workflows such as preparing releases, continuous quality control checking, and dependency management. To manage these processes, a diverse set of tools is required, from command line utilities to powerful ontology engineering environments such as ROBOT. Particularly in the biomedical domain, which has developed a set of highly diverse yet inter-dependent ontologies, standardising release practices and metadata, and establishing shared quality standards, are crucial to enable interoperability. The Ontology Development Kit (ODK) provides a set of standardised, customisable, and automatically executable workflows, and packages all required tooling in a single Docker image. In this paper, we provide an overview of how the ODK works, show how it is used in practice, and describe how we envision it driving standardisation efforts in our community.