Assessing Resolvability and Consistency in OBO Foundry Ontologies: Pilot Study.

Ontologies listed in the OBO Foundry are often regarded as reliable choices to be reused but ontology interoperability of them remains unknown. This study evaluated the resolvability of URIs and consistency of axioms in the OBO Foundry library, BFO ontology, and CIDO ontology. All had nonresolvable URIs, but the OBO library and the CIDO had additional interoperability issues regarding the use of incorrect prefixes, mixing up with ontologies, and inconsistency in the use of property. These detected issues reflected the real-world common problems that were not significant from human beings' point of view but hindered the machine-processability of ontologies. The assessment performed in this study was automated and enables scale-up against more metrics over more ontologies, which remains future work.