Introduction of OntoChina

        With the great advancement of biomedical research and precision medicine, unprecedented data has been accumulated, and the important roles of ontology in data standardization, integration, query and analysis have been realized. To coordinate nationwide ontology research, development and applications, OntoChina was founded in October 2017, under the support of China National Scientific Data Sharing Platform for Population Health (NCMI). The main tasks of OntoChina are multiple. First, OntoChina aims to support the development of reference ontologies, especially bilingual ontologies and Chinese translated ontologies. OntoChina encourages ontology developers to follow the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry principles, reuse OBO ontology terms and avoid content overlap with OBO ontologies. OntoChina also advocates translation of high-quality English ontologies. Second, OntoChina aims to establish an integrative informatics framework for productive ontology research and applications. By adopting the National Center for Biomedical Ontologies (NCBO) BioPortal technology, we set up an ontology repository (http://medportal.bmicc.cn) that features ontology search, versioning, term reusing, visualization and semantic annotations. This ontology repository has stored 44 ontologies including 4 Chinese ontologies. We also introduced Ontobee and Ontofox, two popular tools for reusing, browsing, and querying ontology terms and relationships. In addition, we built a domestic Github server to support collaborative ontology development and efficient communications among developers and users. Third, OntoChina supports ontology training and educational activities in China.