Welcome to the The Environment Ontology

News: 11th October 2008 - Welcome to the new look site! Please bear with us whilst we update the content. In the meantime, you can find out more about the project by visiting our wiki.

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We see the new Environment Ontology (EnvO) bringing similar benefits to those that can already be achieved with the Gene Ontology (GO); through consistent annotation grounded in an ontological framework, we hope to facilitate the semantic retrieval of any biological record anchored to EnvO. For example, those contained in sequence databases, omic data repositories, tissue banks and museum collections.

The focus of our effort will be to develop an ontology that supports the annotation of the environment of any organism or biological sample. However, we hope that EnvO will also be used for the annotation of ANY record that has an environmental component. For example, you might like to tag an environmental descriptor to a picture that you took at the weekend or provide information on the general environment where some remote sensing devices are currently capturing data.

We hope that the community will adopt and contribute to this work, as wide acceptance of standardised terms is key to integration and federated searching of environmental data.