An ontology of information entities, originally driven by work by the Ontology of Biomedical Investigation (OBI) digital entity and realizable information entity branch.

Prefix

iao

Preferred Prefix

IAO

Keywords

assay biomedical science data identity and mapping drug report experimental measurement fair data spaces nfdi4chem nfdi4ing obo ontology study design subject agnostic

Version

2026-03-30

License

CC-BY-4.0

Links

Homepage Repository OBO OWL

Publications

2012 An information artifact ontology perspective on data collections and associated representational artifacts

Pattern for Local Unique Identifiers

Local identifiers in Information Artifact Ontology should match this regular expression:
^\d{7}$

Example Local Unique Identifier

0000030   Resolve

Pattern for CURIES

Compact URIs (CURIEs) constructed from Information Artifact Ontology should match this regular expression:
^IAO:\d{7}$

Example CURIE

IAO:0000030

Pattern for RDF URIs

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_$1

Example RDF URI

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_0000030

Contact

Jie Zheng   0000-0002-2999-0103   zhengj2007

A summary of the relations in the Bioregistry schema can be found here.

Appears In (13)

AGRO CLYH DUO ECOCORE ECTO FBbi FOVT LABO MAXO MCRO PCO PSDO XPO

In Collection (3)

NFDI4Chem Collection NFDI4Ing Collection NFDI4Culture Collection

Mappings from records in Bioregistry to external registries comprises the metaregistry. This resource has 14 mappings to external registries with 4 unique external prefixes.

A provider turns a local unique identifiers from a resource into a URI. Many providers are also resolvable as URLs (i.e., they can be used in a web browser).

The local unique identifier 0000030 is used to demonstrate the providers available for Information Artifact Ontology. Some providers may use a different example, which is displayed in the table below. A guide for curating additional providers can be found here.

Additional providers curated in the Bioregistry are listed here. These are typically inherited from Identifiers.org or Prefix Commons, and need extra curation.