BiodivPortal is part of the RDC mediation layer. It stores and manages a set of terminologies and standard schemas useful for transforming data and metadata into a standard format for processing and storage in the RDC Semantic Layer. BiodivPortal offers among others, services to (i) annotate texts with terms (ii) establish links between semantically related terms (iii) make terms referenceable via stable URIs and (iv) make term versioning transparent.
Semantic search capabilities will be enabled through the Semantic Lookup Index, which stores information about concept synonyms, acronyms, common names as well as broader terms.
As members of the OntoPortal Alliance, we are maintaining and further developing our own instance of the OntoPortal technology dedicated to biodiversity related terminologies, called BiodivPortal. In our context, a terminology refers to any terminological resource, this can be a formal ontology like ENVO, a taxonomy like ITIS, or any useful collections of terms (e.g. locations available via a geographical database like Geonames). OntoPortal is a generic technology to build terminology repositories, catalogues and services. The system architecture of OntoPortal is structured in several layers:
BiodivPortal is available on http://biodivportal.gfbio.org. Users can register to get an account and an API key. As described in the following sections, users can explore, contibute or consume terminologies through the User Interface (UI), Developers can programatically access all available terminologies and services.
BiodivPortal provides access through its User Interface to useful biodiversity related terminologies (i.e. vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies) as well as tools for working with them. It allows users to:
Logged-in users can additionally:
A comprehensive user documentation can be found on the BioPortal wiki page: https://www.bioontology.org/wiki/BioPortal_Help
All information available through the User Interface is also available through the Web Service REST API: https://data.biodivportal.gfbio.dev/. In the following is an overview of the main available API endpoints:
The complete BiodivPortal API documentation can be found here: https://data.biodivportal.gfbio.dev/documentation
Links: