Background Lately, ontologies have become a fundamental building block in the
process of formalising and storing complex biomedical information. The
community-driven ontology curation process, however, ignores the possibility
of multiple communities building, in parallel, conceptualisations of the same
domain, and thus providing slightly different perspectives on the same
knowledge. The individual nature of this effort leads to the need of a
mechanism to enable us to create an overarching and comprehensive overview of
the different perspectives on the domain knowledge. Results We introduce an
approach that enables the loose integration of knowledge emerging from diverse
sources under a single coherent interoperable resource. To accurately track
the original knowledge statements, we record the provenance at very granular
levels. We exemplify the approach in the rare bone disorders domain by
proposing the Rare Bone Disorders Ontology (RBDO). Using RBDO, researchers are
able to answer queries, such as: “What phenotypes describe a particular
disorder and are common to all sources?” or to understand similarities between
disorders based on divergent groupings (classifications) provided by the
underlying sources
