Pistoia Alliance Ontology Design Principles

The Pistoia Alliance Ontology Design Principles establishes a comprehensive governance framework for developing, maintaining, and releasing high-quality ontologies and semantic artefacts across the life sciences. It defines best practices covering ontology architecture, metadata standards, term reuse, modularity, quality control, versioning, documentation, and long-term governance, while promoting interoperability through the adoption of FAIR principles and established standards such as the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). Designed for ontology developers, project teams, and governance bodies, the guidance provides a consistent foundation for creating sustainable, reusable semantic resources that support collaboration across the Pistoia Alliance ecosystem.