OntoPortal Federation
A technical and collaborative framework for federated Semantic Artefact Catalogues.
Our mission
The OntoPortal Federation is a collaborative and technical framework enabling multiple OntoPortal-based Semantic Artefact Catalogues (SACs) to interoperate. Each portal remains autonomous and serves its own scientific community, while benefiting from shared infrastructure, services, and governance practices.
The Federation is a sub-group of the OntoPortal Alliance whose members have committed to a stronger level of interdependence — both technically and organizationally. Participating in the Federation means agreeing to implement federation capabilities and to engage collaboratively in shared governance, content coordination, and community building.
⚙️ Technical federation
Federated portals are interoperable at the API level because they share the same OntoPortal technology. This enables federation features to be implemented at the user interface level with relatively low effort — providing users with seamless access to distributed semantic artefacts across disciplines.
🤝 Governance & collaboration
The Federation operates a distributed, community-driven governance model with a Coordination Committee, an Editorial Board, and a Technical Team. Partners collectively define interoperability rules, metadata curation guidelines, onboarding processes, and shared development priorities.
Federated portals
The OntoPortal Federation currently brings together four domain-specific portals covering environmental sciences, enabling unified access to semantic artefacts across agri-food, ecology, earth sciences, and biodiversity.
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A vocabulary and ontology repository for agronomy and related domains -
The LifeWatch ERIC repository of semantic resources for ecology and related domains -
A semantic artefact repository dedicated to Earth sciences -
A semantic artefact repository for biodiversity
What the Federation enables
Federated Browse
Users can discover ontologies and semantic artefacts not only from their current portal, but also from all other portals in the Federation — with a single browsing interface and shared category filters.
Federated Search
Concept and class search extends across all federated portals simultaneously. Results from each portal are visually distinguished by their colour code and link back to the relevant portal for deeper exploration.
Federated API
Each federated portal exposes a self-description endpoint and a shared API, enabling programmatic access to distributed semantic artefact content and metadata across the entire Federation.
The four federated portals share a consistent user interface and look and feel — AgroPortal, BiodivPortal, EarthPortal, EcoPortal.
Scientific scope
The four federated portals together cover a broad spectrum of environmental and life sciences:
AgroPortal (INRAE, France) — agri-food, plant sciences, and agronomy
EcoPortal (LifeWatch ERIC, Italy) — ecology and related domains
EarthPortal (CNRS / Data Terra, France) — earth and environmental sciences
BiodivPortal (InfAI, Germany) — biodiversity and biological sciences
As of 2025, the four federated portals together provide access to several hundred semantic artefacts across these disciplines, with cross-domain browsing and search available in each portal's interface.
Cite us
Jonquet C., Bouazzouni S., Alviset G., Fiore N., Karam N., Kihal B., Pierkot C., Pulieri M., Rosati I. (2025).
Federated FAIR Semantic Artefacts Discovery and Search with OntoPortal Federation.
In: Proceedings of the 24th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2025), Nara, Japan, pp. 434–450.
Open access (HAL) ·
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-09530-5_25
Joining the Federation
The Federation is open to OntoPortal-based portals that are willing to commit to both its technical requirements and its collaborative governance model. Joining the Federation implies implementing federation capabilities and engaging actively in shared practices around metadata curation, duplicate management, and community coordination.
Other Alliance members have already expressed interest in joining — including portals in the domains of biomedicine, cultural heritage, social sciences, and astronomy.