Vivarium Husbandry Ontology

An open ontology for representing the care of animals kept in vivaria: reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates, and aquatics. VHO provides a machine-readable, human-readable, and researcher-credible vocabulary for vivarium husbandry — the facts of species care, with provenance, compiled per species into effective records that applications consume.

Ontology version 0.3.1.

Vocabulary

• Term documentation — every class, property, and individual with definitions and provenance
• Canonical Turtle — the merged ontology graph
• SHACL shapes (Turtle) — integrity and derivation shapes

Record contract

• JSON-LD context — https://vho.bio/context/record/v1
• Effective-record JSON Schema
• Individual-profile JSON Schema

Effective records

• 2026-08-21 (latest)
• 2026-08-20

/records/latest/… redirects to 2026-08-21.

Consuming VHO

Install @vho-bio/records for the compiled records and contract artifacts, @vho-bio/resolution for the inheritance resolver, or @vho-bio/vho-js for the TypeScript vocabulary bindings. Canonical source of truth is the Turtle in the repository, contributed to by pull request.