Implementation documentation has been updated to include more recent dependencies. Please note that unless stated otherwise in specific instances, newer versions of given depencies should work without issue.

There is a new release of the OLS available, which includes mostly maintenance fixes and loader code improvements (such as failover database support). The source code and clients are available in the downloads section.

The OLS got a facelift in order to better integrate with the new look&feel deployed sitewide at the EBI. In other news, the Medical Subject Heading vocabulary (MeSH) has been removed from the OLS in order to comply with requests from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The full list of loaded ontologies can be seen here.

The unit ontology (UO) has been added to the OLS. The full list of loaded ontologies can be seen here. Furthermore, a quick term ID lookup has been added to the search interface to look up terms by their unique identifiers.

The OLS was featured in an oral presentation at the 6th annual HUPO Congress.

It is now possible to exclude obsoleted terms from the auto-completion list when searching for terms. Simply uncheck the Include obselete terms box and any terms that have been marked as obsolete will no longer be returned in the search results.

The SOAPAction element has been added to the WSDL service declaration to improve interoperability with PHP and other languages that require it.

As announced in the previous news item, the OLS webservice has been redeployed to make it compliant with the latest WSDL specifications and also improve its interoperability. If you are experiencing problems with the new webservice code, please do not hesitate to contact us for support.

The OLS webservice will be undergoing change that will not be backwards-compatible and might break existing code at the end of June. The current WSDL defines multiple operations with the same name but with different parameters. While such method overloading was allowed under previous WSDL specifications, it will no longer be supported. Furthermore, to maximize interoperability, the WSDL will change from a RPC-style service to a document/wrapped style service. As such, users of the OLS webservice are encouraged to update their code to use the new WSDL, which will be published on June 30th.

A paper describing the OLS has been published in BMC Bioinformatics: The Ontology Lookup Service, a lightweight cross-platform tool for controlled vocabulary queries.

4 new ontologies have been added: GRO, MOD, PSI and SO. See the full list here. Also, two new methods have been added to the SOAP interface. View the WSDL here

An AJAX-based ontology browser has now been deployed. Select the ontology you wish to browse from the list and click on the "browse" button.

The OLS now serves 37 ontologies. See the full list here. Significant improvements have also been made to the layout of the web interface, with more in the pipeline.

The Ontology Lookup webservice has been made publicly available for general use by the scientific community.

Ontologies currently available include:

• Gene Ontology (GO)
• Medical SubHeadings (MeSH)
• PSI Molecular Interactions (PSI-MI)