Welcome to the OntoPortal Documentation

About us

OntoPortal is an open-source software stack for building ontology and semantic artefact repositories. It originates from BioPortal, developed by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, and from AgroPortal, originally developed at LIRMM (Laboratoire d’Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier) and now maintained at INRAE.

The OntoPortal Alliance is a consortium of research and infrastructure teams dedicated to promoting semantic services across scientific disciplines. It develops and maintains the shared OntoPortal open-source software, currently powering repositories such as BioPortal, AgroPortal, EcoPortal, and MatPortal, as well as over 135 registered appliance installations worldwide. The Alliance operates as an open community, coordinated through GitHub and sustained through annual workshops.

How this documentation is organized

This documentation is structured into three complementary guides, each targeting a different audience:

• 📖 User Guide — for end users who browse, search, and exploit ontologies and semantic artefacts through an OntoPortal portal.
• 🛠️ Administration Guide — for administrators who install, configure, and maintain their own OntoPortal appliance.
• 💻 Developer Guide — for developers who integrate OntoPortal into their applications (APIs, widgets) or contribute to the software and this documentation.

💡 The User Guide may be customized for a specific OntoPortal instance (e.g., AgroPortal, EcoPortal, EarthPortal). Select your portal at the top of the User Guide; if your portal does not provide a customized version, refer to the default OntoPortal User Guide.

License

The OntoPortal software is distributed under the BSD-2-Clause license. For license details of each component, see the corresponding code repositories.

Contributing

See the section How to contribute to the doc, to know about maintaining and contributing to this documentation.

OntoPortal Alliance is committed to fostering a welcoming community. View our Code of Conduct.

Contact

Thank you to the contributors of this documentation!