Fig. 4

A general ontology development pipeline using XOD principles. To initiate a new ontology, needed terms from existing ontologies are imported and reused (XOD 1) and aligned together with other ontology terms in a consistent semantic framework (XOD 2). To add more terms and semantics afterwards, we can use the same XOD 1/2 methods to add terms from existing ontologies, and for new terms, we can either use ODP-based term generation strategy (XOD 3) and manually align and add terms to the new ontology. Community extensibility (XOD 4) should be considered and applied during the whole ontology development pipeline