NCBO-OOR Development

Welcome to the OOR Project! This developer's guide provides an introduction to the OOR architecture and steps (with examples) of how to customize server-side components. The OOR project is a collaborative open source endeavor to meet the needs of the Open Ontology Repository (OOR) Initiative. The Ontology Open Repository (OOR) initiative is using the BioPortal 2.0 software as a basis for their first "OOR" deployment to begin serving its diverse communities. This page serves as a launch point for understanding the OOR architecture and getting started with customizing the code to advance OOR goals and objectives.

• The NCBO-OOR Architecture page provides a general architecture and philosphy used in it's design and development. This page is geared for any reader who has a basic understanding of multi-tier software architecture.

• The NCBO-OOR Server-Side Customization page describes the design and approach to customization of NCBO-OOR server-side components. To fully execute the examples presented on this page requires that the readers have an understanding of the principles of Aspect of Oriented programming and the open source Spring technology framework. The author strongly recommends reading the NCBO-OOR Architecture page before diving into this document to ensure the reader has a good context.

• The NCBO-OOR Source Control Practices and Processes page describes the practices and processes expected to encourage the open source collaboration of geographically dispersed development teams.

• The NCBO-OOR Sandbox describes the deployed NCBO-OOR software.

OOR Charter

The OOR promotes global use and sharing of ontologies by:

• Establishing a host registry-repository
• Enabling and facilitating open, federated, collaborative ontology repositories
• Establishing best practices for expressing interoperable ontology and taxonomy work in registry-repositories.

Short-Term NCBO-OOR Plan

The "NCBO-OOR" will be executed in two phases:

1) NCBO-OOR Sandbox - Deployed for the February 19, 2009 OOR panel meeting.

2) NCBO-OOR Production - Deployment of the NCBO-OOR software in a server environment that mimics the NCBO BioPortal Production environment.

OOR Developer Collaboration

The OOR developer collaboration will leverage practices that have worked successfully for various OOR community participants. The collaboration approach is still under construction.

An example of practices that the OOR could leverage is the NCBO developer communications infrastructure. This has been established and driven by the NCBO Chief Software Architect (Benjamin Dai) which includes communications channels, source control processes/practices, and NCBO quarterly developer conferences for which all NCBO partners are invited. Though all NCBO partners are welcome to the conferences, they focus primarily on how NCBO software can best serve biomedical communities.