Glossary

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

Basic Formal Ontology. An upper level ontology used to represent things that exist.

CC0

Creative Commons 0 license, a license asserting no rights by anyone, that is “no rights reserved”. CC0 material can be freely used in any manner without attribution.

Domain

A part of the world consisting of related entities.

Dubbing Process

A process by which an identifier is assigned to an entity.

Entity

A thing, as defined in an ontology.

Generically dependent continuant

In BFO, an entity whose existence depends generically on the existence of other entities. Examples include information artifacts (which depend on representations, and “memory”) and organizatins which depend on the people and purpose which define the organization.

IAO

Information Artifacts Ontology. A BFO-based, OBO-compliant ontology for representing information artifacts

Information artifacts

Things that contain or represent information. Examples include documents, software, databases, data elements, and photographs.

OBO

Open Biomedical Ontologies. A collection of ontologies, and a set of principles for developing ontologies that fit together.

OWL

Web Ontology Language. A W3C standard for representing ontologies.

Ontology

A precise exposition declaring entities, their properties and relationships.

RO

Relation Ontology (RO) is used with Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) to represent relations between entities. Object properties are often sub-properties of properties in RO.

ROR

Research Organization Registry. An open (CC0), curated, collection of facts about the research organizations of the world.

Term

The fundamental entry in an ontology. A term may be a class, an annotation property, an object property, or a datatype property.

VIVO

Software, ontologies, and community for representing scholarship.

VIVO 1

The VIVO Ontology as implemented in VIVO beginning with VIVO version 1.6.