about-OBO-Foundry.html

---
layout: doc
title: About the OBO Foundry
---

<h1>About the OBO Foundry</h1>

<p>The mission of the OBO Foundry is to develop a family of interoperable ontologies that are both logically well-formed and scientifically accurate.
To achieve this, OBO Foundry participants follow and contribute to the development of an evolving set of <a href="/principles/fp-000-summary.html">principles</a>
including <a href="/principles/fp-001-open.html">open use</a>, <a href="/principles/fp-010-collaboration.html">collaborative development</a>, <a href="/principles/fp-005-delineated-content.html">non-overlapping and strictly-scoped content</a>, and common <a href="/principles/fp-002-format.html">syntax</a> and <a href="/principles/fp-007-relations.html">relations</a>,
based on ontology models that work well, such as the <a target="_new" href="http://geneontology.org/>Gene Ontology (GO)</a>.
       
<p>The OBO Foundry is overseen by an <a href="http://obofoundry.org/docs/OperationsCommittee.html">Operations Committee</a> with
<a href="/docs/EditorialWG.html">Editorial</a>, <a href="/docs/TechnicalWG.html">Technical</a> and <a href="/docs/OutreachWG.html">Outreach</a> working groups.</a>
      
<p>You can contribute to the OBO Foundry by submitting issues or pull requests to our GitHub repo, <a href="https://github.com/OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io">OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io</a>,
or by joining our mailing list <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/obo-discuss">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/obo-discuss</a>.
If you'd like to submit your ontology for possible inclusion in the OBO Foundry, please follow the instructions <a href="http://www.obofoundry.org/faq/how-do-i-register-my-ontology.html">here</a>.
</p>

<p> An overview of the OBO Foundry can be found in this publication: 
<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814061/">The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration</a>.
       See also this <a href="https://github.com/jamesaoverton/obo-tutorial">OBO tutorial</a>.</p>