The 4th OntoPortal Workshop took place at the Freie Universität Berlin – Institute of Computer Science, Germany, from September 29 to October 3, 2025. Around 20 participants gathered, joined by online contributors and guests from the NFDI community.
The workshop opened with presentations on OntoPortal, the OntoPortal Federation, and the MOD-API, followed by a live feature demonstration. The event also featured presentations from TS4NFDI highlighting integration of OntoPortal within NFDI consortia (NFDI4Biodiversity, FAIRagro, NFDI4Earth, DataPlant, MatWerk), comparisons with TIB’s Terminology Service, and a session on COCODA for mapping tool integration.
Key highlights included:
- Strong and growing community: a dozen new persons in the Alliance and four new OntoPortal instances in social sciences, heritage science, cultural heritage, and astronomy.
- AI integration: presentation of an OntoPortal MCP prototype and an OntoPortal RAG prototype, exploring how generative AI can enhance OntoPortal services.
- Federation governance: review of the federation memorandum of understanding, onboarding procedures, and future directions toward a more formal organizational structure.
- New publications: including the ISWC 2025 Federation paper, a BioPortal NAR article, and several portal-specific papers.
- Zenodo community created for OntoPortal-related outputs, alongside a collaborative Zotero bibliographic collection gathering around 70 items.
- Virtual Appliance: planning for the next VA release and coordination of upstream code contributions.
The workshop reinforced the shared vision of interoperable and FAIR semantic artefact infrastructures and outlined next steps for the Alliance.
The full report is available on HAL: hal-05633274.