The OntoPortal Alliance held its inaugural online kickoff meeting from May 18-20, 2020, bringing together the founding teams for three days of presentations, technical discussions, and strategic planning.
Participants included representatives from Stanford BMIR (Mark Musen, John Graybeal, Jennifer Vendetti, Michael Dorf, Alex Skrenchuk), LIRMM (Clement Jonquet and team), LifeWatch (Nicola Fiore and team), BMICC (Xiaolin Yang and team), and guest company Cogni.zone (Agis Papantoniou, Thomas Grivegnée).
The three-day agenda covered:
- Day 1 – Work Status: Presentations from each team on deployed portals (AgroPortal, SIFR, MedPortal, EcoPortal) and BioPortal, plus an update on the OntoPortal virtual appliance (releases 2.4, 2.5, 3.0).
- Day 2 – Technical: Discussion of technical needs and a roadmap for new features including ontology metadata models, mapping repositories, multilingual annotators, SKOS handling, and internationalization.
- Day 3 – Strategic: Mission statement, governance framework, funding strategies, and social presence of the Alliance.
Key features already in development at the time included: AllegroGraph backend (BioPortal), advanced metadata (AgroPortal), Annotator+ (SIFR/AgroPortal), FAIRness assessment (AgroPortal), DOI assignment (EcoPortal), and SKOS support (EcoPortal).
This meeting established the shared foundation for the OntoPortal Alliance’s open-source collaborative model, which has grown continuously since.