The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) is a new ontology of information entities, originally driven by work by the OBI digital entity and realizable information entity branch. The first workshop on the IAO took place in Boston at the MIT Stata Center, June 9, 2008. See http://neurocommons.org/page/First_IAO_workshop

The IAO mailing-list is available at http://groups.google.com/group/information-ontology

Files

The IAO working development version, in our SVN trunk, is at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/iao/dev/iao.owl. Note that this version is still in early development and may not be stable.

As part of the IAO project, a distinct file defining common metadata properties has been created and is available at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/iao/dev/ontology-metadata.owl. This file can be used by any project, independently of IAO.

Finally, an experimental version that includes some examples from OBI and some bits of OWL 2 is at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/iao/dev/iao-dev.owl.

A reasonable place to start browsing the IAO is at the term information content entity or at the property is about

Credits

The IAO is a descendant of the DENRIE branch of the OBI Project, edited by Chris Stoeckert and other OBI team members. Currently IAO development is being driven by Alan Ruttenberg, Barry Smith and Werner Ceusters and several members of the OBI team, including Melanie Courtot, Bjoern Peters, and James Malone (who acts as spiritual guide).

Presentations

In July 2009, a tutorial From Basic Formal Ontology to the Information Artifact Ontology was presented, colocated at the ICBO: International Conference on Biomedical Ontology. Slides that include a section on topics in the IAO are here. Other presentations may be of interest.