Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) OWL Ontology¶
Local reference identifier:
xwkont:ref:iao-owlSlug:iao-owlEditorial status:candidateCreated:2026-07-01Modified:2026-07-01
Descriptive Metadata¶
| Field | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) | An OWL ontology, not a paper — cited as a primary source document per ADR-0012's provisions for non-paper artifacts, following the same pattern as xwkont:ref:gangemi-dul. |
| Creator | OBO Foundry IAO working group (Alan Ruttenberg and others, per in-file attribution comments) | The ontology's foundational theory is due to Barry Smith and Werner Ceusters — see xwkont:ref:ceusters-smith-2015. |
| Contributor | unknown | |
| Publisher | OBO Foundry / GitHub (information-artifact-ontology/IAO) | |
| Source type | OWL ontology (machine-readable, not a paper) | |
| Version or edition | fetched from the master branch, 2026-07-01 |
|
| Identifier or URL | https://github.com/information-artifact-ontology/IAO/blob/master/iao.owl, PURLs under http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_* |
|
| Access date | 2026-07-01 | |
| Snapshot / Stable identifier | unknown — not yet archived | Checked the Wayback Machine for both the raw GitHub file actually fetched and the canonical purl.obolibrary.org/obo/iao.owl PURL; neither has an archived snapshot as of 2026-07-01. A snapshot of the GitHub blob view (rendered HTML, not the raw file) does exist, but per ADR-0012 this is not fabricated as a substitute since it is not the same byte stream that was actually quoted from. |
| Rights/license | unknown | Not verified in this pass. |
Source Relation Notes¶
This is the actual machine-readable IAO ontology, distinct from xwkont:ref:ceusters-smith-2015 (the Smith & Ceusters 2015 paper that argues for and explains IAO's theoretical foundations). Cite this reference for IAO's exact class IRIs and formal definitions; cite the 2015 paper for the surrounding theoretical justification and discussion of aboutness.
Rights and License Notes¶
Not verified in this pass. Treat as unknown rather than guessed.
Citation and Locator Notes¶
Recommended citation: Information Artifact Ontology (IAO). OBO Foundry. http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/iao.owl.
Directly verified 2026-07-01 by fetching the OWL/XML source directly (plain-text RDF, no PDF-extraction workaround needed) and grepping for the relevant class definition.
Key finding used in docs/crosswalks/concepts/information-artifact.md: IAO_0000030 ("information content entity") is defined as rdfs:subClassOf http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/BFO_0000031 (BFO's Generically Dependent Continuant), with definition: "A generically dependent continuant that is about some thing." This confirms xwkont:ref:ceusters-smith-2015's prose definition and supplies the exact class IRI, previously recorded as unknown in the crosswalk's Source Ontology Correspondences table.