Author: Johannes Hunold

Interested in ontologies in the field of chemistry or closely related disciplines? Then you should definitely take a closer look at our redesigned NFDI4Chem Terminology Service (TS) in its new version 2.0!

The NFDI4Chem TS is a repository for chemistry and chemistry-related ontologies and an essential part for semantic data annotation services. It acts as a single point of access to the latest ontology versions with comprehensive information about their scope, application, and curators. The redesigned web interface and API provides improved usability for both human users and other services or tools, which can embed the ontologies in their own workflows.

From a technical perspective, the release of version 2.0 separated the EBI-OLS based backend from the newly developed frontend, which uses the React library. Newly implemented frontend features include an improved term search with autocomplete function, a redesigned tree view and a streamlined ontology list from which all important information and metrics are now directly visible.

Ontologies of interest can easily be downloaded in both OWL and JSON formats with just one click. Planned upcoming future releases will extend the Terminology Service beyond the provision of ontologies, to also support curation workflows.

The NFDI4Chem Terminology Service release 1.0 has been launched!

FAIR data principles call for rich metadata using a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation. Natural language words and phrases are ambiguous, which makes annotating data with their meanings difficult. Here we can achieve a significant improvement by applying domain-specific terminologies which allow us to unambiguously annotate data. Standardised vocabularies mapped across the various disciplines enable real data interoperability, discovery and exploitation beyond our own domain. The NFDI4Chem Terminology Service provides such chemistry-specific terminologies, thus enabling researchers and software or services of NFDI4Chem to create machine- and human-readable descriptions of research data.

A first use case of the NFDI4Chem Terminology Service is the annotation of experimental descriptions in the chemotion ELN with terms of name reactions from the RXNO ontology. RXNO provides a controlled vocabulary to unambiguously describe applied reactions. Similarly, data repositories can use the Terminology Service to support the semantic annotation of research data during the upload process.

The NFDI4Chem release 1.0 was launched at the end of June 2021. It will provide machine-readable and human-readable descriptions of 19 ontologies which have been identified to be useful for NFDI4Chem. Future developments will include more ontologies, features and additional tools for terminology curation and development.

Find out more at https://terminology.nfdi4chem.de 

If you have any suggestions for terminologies / ontologies to be added or if you are interested in joining NFDI4Chem ontology activities, please contact us.