When biologists started to accumulate ever-increasing amounts of data, this created a need for those data to be annotated in a way that would allow computer programs to reason over the data. This is the role of ontologies – vocabularies that allow to formally describe a domain of knowledge using computer-actionable axioms. The pioneering efforts of the Gene Ontology, in the late 1990s, soon led to the creation of many more ontologies to annotate all kinds of biological data, most of them regrouped in the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry (OBO Foundry).

One such ontology was the Biological Imaging Methods Ontology (also known as “FBbi”, for “FlyBase biological imaging”), which was created in the early 2000s by data curators working for FlyBase.org, the model organism database for Drosophila melanogaster data. The ontology provided terms that curators could use to annotate images to explain how the images had been obtained (which imaging method(s) had been used to produce the images).

Unfortunately, FlyBase stopped the development of the Biological Imaging Methods Ontology in 2005. Subsequently, two different research groups tried to step in and maintain the ontology on their own, but none of these efforts turned out to be sustained in the long term, and the ontology has remained in limbo ever since. This has been a real problem for people working with imaging data, which were left with an incomplete ontology that has not kept up with the evolution of imaging methods.

Now, in collaboration with the EMBL-EBI’s BioImage Archive and under the umbrella of the FoundingGIDE project, the German BioImaging team is reviving the Biological Imaging Methods Ontology and will assure its continued development so that it can meet the needs of the imaging community. The ontology now lives at https://github.com/foundingGIDE/fbbi, where new releases will be made available. Anyone in needs of new terms to describe their favourite imaging method is encouraged to submit new term requests (NTRs) in the issue tracker.