Nicolas Le Novère proposed to create a controlled vocabulary to store the content of Pedro Mendes' mind before he wandered out of the community.
A relational database management system (MySQL) at the back-end is accessed through a web interface based on Java Server Pages (JSP) and JavaBeans.
Several exports formats (OBO flat file, SBO-XML and OWL) are generated daily or on request and can be downloaded from the web interface.
To allow programmatic access to the resource, Web Services have been implemented based on Apache Axis for the communication layer and Castor for the validation.
Simulation tools can check the consistency of a rate law, convert reaction from one modelling framework to another (e.g., continuous to discrete), or distinguish between identical mathematical expressions based on different assumptions (e.g., Michaelis–Menten vs. Briggs–Haldane).
SBO is built in collaboration by the Computational Neurobiology Group (Nicolas Le Novère, EMBL-EBI, United-Kingdom) and the SBMLTeam (Michael Hucka, Caltech, USA).