The mission of the Foundry is to develop a family of inter operable ontologies that are both logically well-formed and scientifically accurate. To achieve this, OREO participants voluntarily adhere to and contribute to the development of an evolving set of principles including open use, collaborative development, non-overlapping and strictly-scoped content, and common syntax and relations, based on ontology models that work well, such as the Gene Ontology (GO).
OREO is overseen by an Operations Committee with Editorial, Technical and Outreach working groups. The processes of the Editorial working group are modeled on the journal refereeing process.