Applying Rigidity to Standardizing OBO Foundry Candidate Ontologies

The Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry initiative is a collaborative effort for developing interoperable, science-based ontologies. OBO uses the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as its upper ontology. Ontologies developed for OBO use include some that have been ratified, and others holding the status of candidate. There are no formal, principled criteria that a candidate ontology must meet for ratification. To help address this problem, we propose a formal integration between Rigidity, a major component of OntoClean’s approach to quality assurance of ontologies, and BFO’s theory of types. This work augments ongoing efforts to build software designed to evaluate and standardize OBO Foundry candidate ontologies.