Table 1.

Criteria Established by CoP Experts to Characterize the Quality of Ontologies for Data Annotation

Criteria Classified by the Expert Panel
1	Adhere to the OBO Foundry guidelines
2	Represent a unique non-overlapping knowledge domain (also known as orthogonality)
3	Willingness to express and integrate multiple, evidence-based classification systems in the chosen domain
4	Logically structured with a well-defined scope
5	May contain relationships and dependencies to other reference ontologies
6	Represent accurate science supported by evidence
7	Open source and Creative Commons CC-BY or CC-0 license (https://creativecommons.org/)
8	Must be widely used in annotation and data capture
9	Support both inter- and intra-specific needs with species agnostic (core) and specific (extensions) resources that work together
10	Sustainable funding sources
11	Human resources to manage (i.e., curators, editors, and developers)
12	Established ontology management system, including roles and responsibility
13	Must be designed to answer both the computing and community needs
14	Must explicitly identify the communities of reference
15	Centralized maintenance of the validated content, and distributed contribution and access
16	Ontology quality assurance by experts in the field of knowledge
17	Reducing reliance on internal processes and data stewardship networks