ABSTRACT
Two ontology languages, OBO and OWL, account for most of the predominant bio-ontologies. Good open-source software is available for creating and using ontologies in these languages. As we will see, OWL was developed by the W3C as a general tool for the Semantic Web, and OWL therefore represents an extremely powerful but also relatively complex language that can be used for a number of purposes including the development of bio-ontologies. OBO was developed by the Gene Ontology (GO) consortium for the GO and has been widely adopted by numerous other bio-ontologies. For many, but not all, concepts of importance in the biomedical domain, equivalent ontologies can be constructed with either OBO or OWL.
