How to connect OntoPortals to related databases and possibly enable semantic search, and semantic indexing of their content

[jonquet]

This discussion is to capture the feedback from the community with respect to implementing functionalities to connect OntoPortals to related databases and possibly enable semantic search, and semantic indexing of their content (somehow: re-inventing the NCBO Resource Index). This is an extract from the OntoPortal Workshop 2023 report.

A recurrent topic is how to connect OntoPortals to related databases and possibly enable semantic search, and semantic indexing of their content. Do you have any suggestions on this?

• Need ability to select ontologies for autocompletion (exists in the widget but needs revamping).
• Why not come to an ontology repository to explore the resources in a database.
• OntoPortals provide ways to get to data itself, that's desirable.
• We convince communities to create ontologies, but then we don't show them the added value of using them for datasets or databases.
• Understanding why the related topics are brought up, and why they are related, is very important.
• Getting a list of databases or datasets that use terms hosted in the portal is interesting to see what an ontology is used for. Diving into the datasets from the ontology terms maybe a different tool than the ontology portal.
• Getting annotated text back is also important: don’t drop the Annotator.