Periscoped
Ontology Atlas
Built by Periscoped

The world has already been modeled. Find it.

A searchable map of the public ontologies, registries and vocabularies that describe the world — so you can reuse the best model instead of reinventing it.

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Don't reinvent the wheel

The world has already been modeled — extensively, obsessively, by tens of thousands of people over three decades. If you're mapping out a domain, chances are someone has already built a public model you can borrow from, use directly, or enhance. The problem was never a lack of ontologies. It's that they're scattered across dozens of registries, buried in papers, and published under acronyms you've never heard of.

The Ontology Atlas pulls them into one place you can actually search. It's the companion to our writing on the subject — how to build an ontology and how to find one that already exists. Reuse is the fastest path to a world-class domain model, and this is where you start.

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public ontologies, registries & vocabularies, searchable in one place

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domains — from biomedicine and finance to geospatial and agriculture

Live

pulled directly from OBO Foundry and the EMBL-EBI Ontology Lookup Service

What's inside

Every entry is mapped from a public source into one consistent, searchable shape — name, domain, description, license and home link. The catalog blends two kinds of source:

Live registries

The OBO Foundry (200+ principled life-science ontologies built on a shared upper ontology) and the EMBL-EBI Ontology Lookup Service (hundreds of ontologies, millions of classes) — fetched directly from their APIs.

Curated standards

The cross-industry and clinical models those registries don't hold — schema.org, Dublin Core, SKOS, PROV-O, FIBO, GS1, SNOMED CT, ICD-11, GeoNames and more.

How to use it

Search by anything. Type a domain (“disease”, “units”, “finance”), an acronym (“GO”, “FIBO”), or a keyword. Results rank the closest matches first and highlight where they hit. Press / to jump to search from anywhere on the page.

Filter by domain. Use the category chips to narrow to registries, upper ontologies, cross-industry vocabularies, or a specific field. Each card links straight to the ontology's home so you can go deep.

Then reuse, don't rebuild. Anchor to the best existing model, pull in the terms you need, and enhance it to fit your domain — that's the whole game.

Questions

What is an ontology?

An ontology is a formal, explicit description of the concepts in a domain, their properties, and the rules that constrain how they relate. Unlike a database schema, it captures meaning — what a thing is and how it connects — in a machine-readable form.

Why reuse an existing ontology instead of building your own?

Most domains have already been modeled by communities that have refined their work for decades. Reusing an established ontology gives you thousands of hours of domain expertise for free, keeps you interoperable with the rest of your field, and lets your AI reason over a battle-tested model instead of one built under deadline.

Where do these ontologies come from?

The Atlas aggregates entries live from the OBO Foundry and the EMBL-EBI Ontology Lookup Service, combined with a curated set of cross-industry and clinical standards such as schema.org, Dublin Core, SKOS, FIBO, GS1, SNOMED CT and ICD-11.

Need help modeling your domain?

Finding the right ontology is step one. Adapting and enhancing it for your system — with agents that mine this catalog and modern LLMs that extend it — is what we do at Periscoped.

Work with Periscoped