Biomedical Ontologies and Controlled Vocabularies

DogmaModeler is a free, open-source ontology development tool intended to enable non-IT experts to model ontologies.

Protégé is a free, open-source ontology development tool created by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

• Ontodog - an ontology community view generator.
• Ontofox - a tool that fetches ontology terms and axioms.
• Ontobee -  a linked data server and browser specifically designed for ontology terms. Ontobee is the default linked ontology data server for OBO Foundry library ontologies.

The following steps, adapted from Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology, provide a general guideline for approaching ontology development.

1. Determine the domain and scope of the ontology.

2. Consider reusing existing ontologies.

3. Enumerate important terms.

4. Define the classes & class hierarchy.

5. Define the properties of classes.

6. Define the facets of the slots.

7. Create instances.