This upper ontology is constructed to serve the Food Security Community, and is meant to serve as a starting point for the development of new ontologies, knowledge graphs, and ontologically referenced data.
It includes the following component ontologies.
- The Agronomy Ontology (AgrO) provides terms from the agronomy domain that are semantically organized and can facilitate the collection, storage and use of agronomic data, enabling easy interpretation and reuse of the data by humans and machines alike.
- FoodOn belongs to the open source OBO Foundry consortium of interoperable life science oriented ontologies and consequently supports FAIR data annotation and sharing objectives across a wide variety of academic research, government and commercial sectors. We work to ensure these ontologies resemble an encyclopedia sharing common relationships and distinctions about material entities, characteristics, processes, and information, rather than as “stand alone” ontologies which are usable in a narrow domain but involve paradigm translation issues when the federation of other ontology enhanced data is attempted.
- The Environment Ontology (ENVO) is an expressive, machine-actionable knowledge representation of environmental entities. Using ENVO to describe things like ecosystems, entire planets and other astronomical bodies, their parts, or environmental processes increases the interoperability of environmental descriptions, helping (meta)data records achieve demonstrable FAIRness.
- The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) is a ontology of information entities, originally driven by work by the OBI digital entity and realizable information entity branch.
- YAGO (4.5) is a knowledge base, i.e., a database with knowledge about the real world. YAGO contains both entities (such as movies, people, cities, countries, etc.) and relations between these entities (who played in which movie, which city is located in which country, etc.). YAGO combines two great resources:
(a) Wikidata is the largest general-purpose knowledge base on the Semantic Web. It is a great repository of entities, but it has a difficult taxonomy and no human-readable entity identifiers. (b) schema.org is a standard ontology of classes and relations, which is maintained by Google and others — but it does not have any entities. We have added the taxonomy part of the YAGO knowledge graph here.