The OntoPortal community gathered at the Observatoire de Paris, France, from September 21 to 25, 2026, for the 5th OntoPortal Workshop, bringing members together both on site and online.
The Alliance now brings together 10 public portals and 3 upcoming ones, with CHPortal, the repository of cultural heritage ontologies, newly released this year. The workshop highlighted the complementary roles of the broader Alliance—as an open community of practice—and the more committed OntoPortal Federation.
A key highlight was the public online session (September 23), gathering 77 attendees from across international communities, featuring six presentations by representative users:
- Adriana Mariotti (CMCC-ICOS) – EcoPortal as a service to manage semantic artefacts for European research infrastructures
- Roberto García (Universitat de Lleida) – AgroPortal as a vocabulary hub in the Common European Agricultural Data Space
- Steven Piel (Ifremer) – Using O’FAIRe to improve the FAIRness of the OSO ontology
- Sylvain Grellet (BRGM) – Use of EarthPortal by Data Terra’s MTEP
- Stuart Chalk (University of North Florida) – I-ADOPT
- John Graybeal (UC San Diego) – Applying CEDAR and BioPortal to the NIAID Metadata Blueprint
During the workshop, discussions and sessions covered:
- AI and MCP services: Integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) and AI-assisted workflows into the OntoPortal ecosystem.
- Ontolex-Lemon terminologies: An extended enhancement of the OntoPortal technology to support rich lexical and linguistic resources (developed by UPM in the TeresIA project).
- Ecosystem integrations: Connecting OntoPortal with downstream tools and consuming services, including the ITINERIS Terminology Service, KG-BioPortal, Pontus-X/AgrospAI, and OpenTheso.
- Governance & metadata: Advancing OntoPortal Federation guidelines, metadata curation, and formal organizational structures.
- Engineering & shared code: Improving deployment recipes, shared documentation, and collaborative development workflows.
Upcoming Report
The full workshop report summarizing discussions and roadmap decisions is currently in preparation and will be published on HAL soon.