To curate and maintain SBO, a dedicated resource has been developed and the public interface of the SBO browser can be accessed at [http://www.ebi.ac.uk/sbo http://www.ebi.ac.uk/sbo].
A relational database management system (MySQL) at the back-end is
accessed through a web interface based on Java Server Pages (JSP) and JavaBeans.  Its
content is encoded in UTF-8, therefore supporting a large set of
characters in the definitions of terms.  Distributed curation is made possible
by using a custom-tailored locking system allowing concurrent access.
This system allows a continuous update of the ontology with immediate
availability and suppress merging problems.
Several exports formats ([http://www.godatabase.org/dev/doc/obo_format_spec.html OBO] flat file, [http://www.ebi.ac.uk/sbo/docs/sboxml_schema.xsd SBO-XML] and [http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ OWL]) are generated daily or on request and can be downloaded from the web interface.
To allow programmatic access to the resource, Web Services have been implemented based on [http://ws.apache.org/axis/ Apache Axis] for the communication layer and [http://www.castor.org/ Castor] for the validation. The libraries, full documentation, samples and tutorial are available [http://www.ebi.ac.uk/sbo/SBOWSLib/ws.html online].
The SourceForge project can be accessed at [http://sourceforge.net/projects/sbo/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/sbo/].