About EnvO

The Environment Ontology (ENVO) is an expressive, machine-actionable knowledge representation of environmental entities. Using ENVO to describe things like ecosystems, entire planets and other astronomical bodies, their parts, or environmental processes increases the interoperability of environmental descriptions, helping (meta)data records achieve demonstrable FAIRness.

ENVO started as a relatively simple controlled and structured vocabulary to support the metadata checklists of the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC). Over the years, it's matured into a fully-fledged ontology within the OBO Foundry & Library and now supports a wide range of initiatives ranging from individual research projects to inter-governmental data, information, and knowledge exchanges. Collaborations with the ESIP Federation, UN Environment, and IOC-UNESCO have greatly inspired ENVO's current form, and - alongside the requests of individuals and projects - are guiding its evolution.

ENVO continues to develop through an ever-growing co-editorial team and partnerships with other ontologies, thesauri, controlled vocabularies and other terminological and semantic web resources. Increasingly diverse requests for content are shaping ENVO into a comprehensive community resource to help many stakeholders face mounting pressures on our biosphere.

You can use ENVO terms to provide information on the environment of remote sensing devices or simply to tag a picture that you took at the weekend (see our brief annotation guidelines for more). ENVO is an open project, and we welcome participation of all kinds. Please contact us to learn more!