In the process of developing new ontologies, it is good practice to leverage existing community standards. In our initial analysis, we confirmed that there were no explicit ontologies that efficiently captured epitope details as per the scope of the IEDB program. As mentioned above, we have utilized, as much as possible, inferred ontologies from existing epitope databases. Among the ontologies that we analyzed, IMGT-Ontology and Gene Ontology were the only two formal ontologies that were related to the epitope domain. The IMGT-Ontology was designed for the ImMunoGeneTics database. IMGT is an integrated database specializing in antigen receptors (immunoglobulins and T-cell receptors) and the major histocompatibility complex of all vertebrate species. The ontology developed for this database has specific immunological content, describing the classification and specification of terms needed for immunogenetics. The IEDB does conform to IMGT's standards about receptors and MHC molecule chains in the sense that all the chain names follow IMGT's controlled vocabulary.