Ontology

MESH

Medical Subject Headings

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity. This thesaurus is used by NLM for indexing articles from biomedical journals, cataloguing of books, documents, etc.

bioinformaticsbiomedical scienceclassificationdata retrievallife scienceliterature curationmetascienceontology
E34

FAIR 38/48

Version 2025

Evaluated 26 Oct 2026

How scores work

Source & access

Homepagenlm.nih.gov DownloadCanonical file / PURL Browse in OLSEMBL-EBI Ontology Lookup ServiceBrowse in BioPortalNCBO BioPortal

Portals & registries

SourceIDVersionClassesPropertiesIndividualsLoaded
OLS (EMBL-EBI)mesh2025355,0288025 Oct 2026

Ontology IRI https://w3id.org/biopragmatics/resources/mesh/mesh.ofn
Version IRI https://w3id.org/biopragmatics/resources/mesh/2025/mesh.ofn

Languages en

Imports from (1)
IAO

Reused by (1)
VALUESETS

Also registered as
aberowl: MESH bioportal: MESH fairsharing: FAIRsharing.qnkw45 ols: mesh wikidata.entity: Q199897

Automated evaluation

F Findable FAIR9/12
  • Persistent identifier (F1)w3id.org+4
  • Indexed in services (F4)4: OLS, BioPortal, Bioregistry, FAIRsharing+5
  • Citable reference (F2)no reference publication listed0
A Accessible FAIR12/12
  • Homepage reachableHTTP 200+3
  • Artefact retrievable over HTTP(S) (A1)download HTTP 200+6
  • Metadata persists in a registry (A2)Bioregistry+3
I Interoperable FAIR10/12
  • Formal machine-readable format (I1)OWL, OBO+5
  • Semantic-web IRIs (I2)OWL, OBO+3
  • References other vocabularies (I3)imports 1: iao+2
R Reusable FAIR7/12
  • Clear license (R1.1)CC0 1.0+5
  • Release provenance (R1.2)2025 (OLS); not declared inside the artefact+2
  • Community standards (R1.3)no independent compliance report (not on the OBO Dashboard)0
Q Ontology consistency & quality0/20
  • Logical consistencynever checked by a reasoner0
  • OWL 2 DL profileprofile not checked0
  • Upper-ontology alignmentno BFO/COB/DOLCE import found0
  • Standard relations (RO)does not import the Relation Ontology0
  • ROBOT report: no errorsno ROBOT report available0
  • ROBOT report: warning densityno ROBOT report available0
  • Pitfall scan: no critical pitfallsno pitfall scan or ROBOT report yet0
M Maintenance0/16
  • Recencyno activity evidence0
  • Release cadence (12 months)0 releases0
U Community adoption1/16
  • Documented adopting projects0 projects0
  • Reused by other ontologies1: valuesets+1
  • Community signalmax(stars 0 → 0, citations 0 → 0)0
P Penalties (inactivity & inconsistency)-5
  • No activity evidenceno commits, releases or dated files found-5
  • Inactive statusnot archived, legacy or inactive0
  • Consistencynot yet checked by a reasoner0

FAIR subtotal 38/48 · earned 39/100 − 5 inactivity = 34/100 → grade E

Community adoption 0

No adopting projects documented yet.

Know a project that uses MESH? Suggest it.

History & changes 1 run

History starts with the first archived run; changes appear after the next evaluation.

RunScoreFAIRVersion evaluatedTermsSnapshot
26 Oct 2026, 03:31 UTC34 E382025355,028JSON

Provenance

Every fact on this page was fetched automatically. Each row shows where it came from and when. If a source fails, the last good value is kept and marked “carried forward”.

FactSourceRetrieved
Homepage link check (HTTP 200)nlm.nih.gov26 Oct 2026, 03:05 UTC
Download link check (HTTP 200)w3id.org26 Oct 2026, 03:05 UTC
Artefact headerraw.githubusercontent.com26 Oct 2026, 03:05 UTC
OLS classes, imports, version & releaseebi.ac.uk26 Oct 2026, 03:05 UTC
Bioregistry mappings, dependencies & reusebioregistry.io26 Oct 2026, 03:05 UTC

Run 2026-10-26T02-37-38Z · evaluator v2.0.0 · rubric v3.4 · entry.json · run snapshot