The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry is a group of people who build and maintain ontologies related to the life sciences. The OBO Foundry establishes a set of principles for ontology development for creating a suite of interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain. Currently, there are more than a hundred ontologies that follow the OBO Foundry principles.
The OBO Foundry effort makes it easier to integrate biomedical results and carry out analysis in bioinformatics. It does so by offering a structured reference for terms of different research fields and their interconnections (ex: a phenotype in a mouse model and its related phenotype in zebrafish).