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Similarly as with "ont," the orr-ont service mainly provides an API for client applications to access and manage a repository of ontologies and corresponding submitting users.

The following is a comparison between "ont" and "orr-ont" with respect to various aspects. This is preliminary, not exhaustive, but should give a good sense of the intent.

Aspect	ont	orr-ont
Request for latest version	Converts from the versioned form	Immediately returned
Output formats	RDF/XML, N3	RDF/XML, N3, JSON-LD
Request in other format	Conversion always made	Conversion only once then cached
Ontology versions stored in	Versioned form	Un-versioned form
"self-hosted" dispatch	Supported	Supported
Organization (authority) support	Very minimal	Better supported (1)
Permissions	Minimal	Significantly improved
Main dependencies, database	BioPortal, MySQL	MongoDB
Language/dispatch mechanism	Java / Servlet	Scala / Scalatra

(1) Organizations are explicitly modeled in orr-ont. All ontology submissions are associated with corresponding organizations. An organization has set of members, and only members can register ontologies for that organization.

In general, because of the new and simplified mechanisms in orr-ont, a number of benefits are expected:

• Easier installation because of reduced number of important dependencies
• Better performance (possibly very significant)

Also, the code is simplified and should be easier to maintain and extend thanks to the use of a modern Web micro-framework as provided by Scalatra. Other frameworks could also be considered (in particular Akka HTTP, but Scalatra is proving to be an excellent alternative at least for the time being.