The OBO-Dashboard automatically checks ontologies for adherence to OBO Foundry principles.
Developing ontologies that are easily re-usable and compatible with each other is a difficult process. The OBO Foundry principles, a set of shared development practices for Open Biological and Biomedical ontologies, aim to make make this process easier by introducing shared conventions, such as standard identifiers, recommendations for open licenses, recommendations for documentation and more.
In our growing community, it has become hard to provide a consistently high standard of concrete development advice to implement these shared principles. This is especially true for new OBOFoundry candidate ontologies, whose developers frequently seek advice on how to make their ontology more useful for others. To address this issue, the OBOFoundry technical working group has developed a suite of tools, such as ROBOT report, the Ontology Development Kit, and the OBO Dashboard, that make checking of ontologies for errors (quality control) and conformance to OBOFoundry principles easier. The OBO-Dashboard in particular presents the results of our OBO principle conformance checks and ROBOT report in a way that should make it easier to identify places where ontologies can be improved.