ontoat

Ontoat is an open-source ontology-driven annotation framework designed to attach standardized ontology terms to data items. It provides a modular backend, a REST API, and a web-based user interface that allows domain experts to browse ontologies, select terms, and apply them to datasets. The project emphasizes interoperability with semantic web standards and supports common ontology formats such as OWL and SKOS, as well as export formats including JSON-LD and RDF triples.

Key features include ontology lookup and term suggestion, multilingual term labels, disambiguation guidance when multiple terms share a label, versioning of term mappings, and batch annotation workflows. It can integrate with external ontology repositories and custom local vocabularies, enabling provenance tracking for annotations.

History: Ontoat began as an open-source research prototype in the mid-2010s and has evolved through community contributions into a production-ready tool. It has been used in pilot projects across biology, digital humanities, and information science to improve data interoperability.

Usage: Typical users are data curators, researchers, and information managers who need to annotate records, samples, or documents with formal ontologies. The tool supports collaborative workflows through access control and review queues.

See also: Ontology, Semantic annotation, SKOS, OWL, JSON-LD.