Introduction

The Relation Ontology (RO) includes over 400 relations covering a variety of domains in the biological, biomedical and environmental sciences, making use of a wide variety of axiom types. This guide is intended to help navigate the structure of the RO and provide assistance with interpreting it.

Note that we expect very few users will need to peruse the whole ontology in its entirety. Most people will encounter RO through some subset that is used within another ontology. For example, a user browsing Uberon may see a develops from relationship linking two classes. Clicking on this may lead to a resource such as OntoBee, where more details can be found. In fact many users may not need to be aware of RO at all: the ontology may be used behind the scenes to calculate results.

However, we expect some users may have a need to browse the whole ontology. These include ontology developers or data modelers looking to reuse relations. Here some additional guidance may prove useful.

Slides

The best place to get a general overview of RO is the slides presented at Denver 2018 RO Meeting.

How to browse RO

In order to fully comprehend RO it is necessary to inspect it using a tool that supports the entirety of the OWL2 language. In practice this means Protege 5, a desktop application.

The best web-based way to browse RO is through OntoBee or OLS. However, RO sometimes uses constructs not supported by OntoBee or OLS, and sometimes OntoBee fails to display the full hierarchy. However, OntoBee provides one advantage over Protege: each relation can be browsed in the context of its usage.

We recommend use of Protege, sometimes complemented by OntoBee. For Protege, like all OBO ontologies, the ontology should be accessed via its purl, i.e. http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ro.owl (or if you want to see the bleeding edge version you can check out this repo and use ro-edit.owl)