When deciding what ontologies to use in one’s research it is useful to consider the following criteria:

1. Do all their classes of entity have a parent class, all the way up to a foundational ontology such as Basic Formal Ontology?
2. Do the definitions of the entities classes conform to good practice.
3. Do the entity IDs conform to the OWL (Web Ontology Language) standard, which allows them to be directly imported and referenced using a URL (Uniform Resource Locator - web address)?
4. Do they make appropriate use of entities in other ontologies rather than unnecessarily creating new ones?
5. Have they been developed in consultation with domain experts?
6. Are they being properly maintained and updated as required?

For more information on quality criteria for ontologies see Norris et al (2019).