OntoCAT provides high level abstraction for interacting with ontology resources including local ontology files in standard OWL and OBO formats (via OWL API ) and public ontology repositories: EBI Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) and NCBO BioPortal . Each resource is wrapped behind easy to learn Java, Bioconductor/R and REST web service commands enabling reuse and integration of ontology software efforts despite variation in technologies.
OntoCAT exists in many flavours including a stand-alone database and browser, REST service, Google App application and ontoCAT R package to work with ontologies in R environment. See download page for all the options.
The current repertoire of supported ontology resources can easily be extended for other resources. Such services would only need to implement the OntologyService interface to immediately become aligned with pre-existing resources and allow for their seamless interchangeability.