As biological and biomedical research increasingly reference the environmental context of the biological entities under study, the need for formalisation and standardisation of environment descriptors is growing. The Environment Ontology (ENVO; www.environmentontology.org) is a community-led, open project which seeks to provide an ontology for specifying a wide range of environments relevant to multiple life science disciplines and, through an open participation model, to accommodate the

more »

... logical requirements of all those needing to annotate data using ontology classes. This paper summarises ENVO's motivation, content, structure, adoption, and governance approach. The ontology is available from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/envo.owl -an OBO format version is also available by switching the file suffix to "obo".