[1] OBI provides a model for the design of an investigation, the protocols and instrumentation used, the materials used, the data generated and the type of analysis performed on it.
[2] The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) addresses the need for controlled vocabularies to support integration and joint ("cross-omics") analysis of experimental data, a need originally identified in the transcriptomics domain by the FGED Society, which developed the MGED Ontology as an annotation resource for microarray data.Smith B, Ashburner M, Rosse C, Bard J, Bug W, Ceusters W, et al. (November 2007).
"The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration".
The MGED Ontology was originally identified in the transcriptomics domain by the FGED Society and was developed to address the needs of data integration.
As an international, cross-domain initiative, the OBI consortium draws upon a pool of experts from a variety of fields, not limited to biology.