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Main Authors: McLaughlin, James, Lagrimas, Josh, Iqbal, Haider, Parkinson, Helen, Harmse, Henriette
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13034
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author McLaughlin, James
Lagrimas, Josh
Iqbal, Haider
Parkinson, Helen
Harmse, Henriette
author_facet McLaughlin, James
Lagrimas, Josh
Iqbal, Haider
Parkinson, Helen
Harmse, Henriette
contents 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 backwards compatible API supporting users of OLS3 to transition.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_13034
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OLS4: A new Ontology Lookup Service for a growing interdisciplinary knowledge ecosystem
McLaughlin, James
Lagrimas, Josh
Iqbal, Haider
Parkinson, Helen
Harmse, Henriette
Information Retrieval
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 backwards compatible API supporting users of OLS3 to transition.
title OLS4: A new Ontology Lookup Service for a growing interdisciplinary knowledge ecosystem
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13034