Online tutorial
Ontology Lookup Service
Quick tour
Time to complete:
1 hour
This course includes:
Written by:
Last reviewed:
December 2025
All materials are free cultural works licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, except where further licensing details are provided.
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The Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) is a repository for biomedical ontologies that aims to provide a single point of access to the latest ontology versions. You can browse the ontologies through the website as well as programmatically via the OLS API. This quick tour provides information on different features of OLS, including how to search and visualise different ontologies.
Who is this course for?
This course is for anyone interested in biomedical ontologies and exploring them using OLS. No pre-requisite knowledge is required, but having prior knowledge of ontologies will be helpful.
What will I achieve?
By the end of the course you will be able to:
- Explain the fundamentals of OLS
- Navigate the OLS to search and visualise various ontology data
- Query data through the OLS API
DOI:
TOL.ontology-lookup-service-t.2025.00001.1
Course contents
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