How are ontologies added to OLS?

Ontologies can be added to OLS in 1 of 2 ways.

1. All ontologies registered with the OBO Foundry are automatically added to OLS. Hence, one way to get your ontology onto OLS is to register your ontology with the OBO Foundry.
2. Your ontology can be directly added to OLS. To do this you have to do the following:
   1. Download and fill out this spreadsheet.
   2. In filling out the spreadsheet the 2 most important fields are:
      • preferredPrefix: This should be a string of lowercase character at least 5 characters long. This string must be unique on OLS.
      • ontology_purl: This is the permanent publicly accessible URL from where OLS will load your. This is also the URL that OLS checks on a frequent basis to check for new releases of your ontology.
   3. Create a new issue asking for your ontology to be added and upload the filled-out spreadsheet.

Please note the following:

1. Only biologic and/or bioinformatics related ontologies may be added to the EBI OLS instance. If your ontology is not biologic and/or bioinformatics related you can still host your own instance of OLS with any ontologies you require.
2. Currently OLS only supports ontologies in XML/RDF format.