Supporting research and pandemic preparedness with an ontology for interoperable pathogen-resource catalogues

Pandemic preparedness requires pathogen resources and services to be discoverable and comparable across heterogeneous provider catalogues. The European Viral Outbreak Response Alliance Ontology (EVORAO) provides an open semantic model for describing shareable pathogen materials, derived products and associated services. EVORAO uses the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) as a structural backbone, implements selected constraints aligned with the DCAT Application Profile (DCAT-AP), and defines pathogen-resource concepts, properties and relationships covering identification, biological material origin, availability, request routes, biosafety, transport, licensing, provenance and contacts. Scientific experts curated the terms, definitions and structure used to generate EVORAO and the implementation artefacts that facilitate its adoption. Automated validation includes ontology reasoning, constraint validation and competency-query testing. EVORAO 1.2.0 declares 79 classes and 209 properties; its namespace contains 72 classes, 64 object properties and 129 data properties. EVORAO is released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) 1.0 Universal. Its implementation in the EVORA Portal illustrates how EVORAO supports unified catalogue search and comparison of pathogen resources and services across providers, thereby supporting pandemic preparedness.