The BCIO aims to provide a unified conceptual framework with labels and definitions of entities that people working in the field of behavioural science can use in their writing and when constructing data sets.

It is designed to be able to be linked with any related ontology that covers topics in more detail or that overlap with behavioural science. Thus, for example, as people develop ontologies for specific parts of behavioural science such as particular behaviours such as eating, it is hoped that these can be linked to the BCIO to create a unified system for representing information and coding data.

The BCIO has built on the foundational ontology, Basic Formal Ontology, which is used in much of bioscience. This provides a basis for linking the BCIO with other ontologies using this framework.