VBO.
Every breed, one name, across every dataset.
The Vertebrate Breed Ontology. Breed identity, made comparable.
Why VBO exists
A breed is one of the messiest words in animal data.
One registry writes "Labrador Retriever." Another writes "Retriever - Labrador." A research dataset writes "lab." A clinic writes "Labrador." A European kennel club has it under a number. None of them agree, none of them link, and a computer reading across all of them sees five different breeds where there is one. The same problem multiplied by every breed and every species turns breed data into something you cannot compute on.
OMIA solved this for inherited disease. The Vertebrate Breed Ontology solves it for the breeds themselves. It is the work of the Monarch Initiative, the group behind much of the ontology infrastructure that human and model-organism genetics already rely on, built in direct collaboration with OMIA. The disease catalogue and the breed catalogue were designed to fit together, which is why a disease record and a breed record meet on the same identity.
VBO gives every breed a single canonical identity that everything else can point at.
What VBO holds
A canonical ID for every breed.
Each breed gets a stable VBO identifier, like VBO:0200800 for the Labrador Retriever, that never changes and that any dataset can reference. That single shared address is the whole point. It is what lets two datasets about the same breed finally be talking about the same thing.
Every name people actually use.
VBO records the synonyms: the nicknames, the registry spellings, the reorderings. "Lab," "Labrador," "Retriever - Labrador," all mapped to the one identity. It also carries cross-references to the major registries, FCI, iDog, and VeNom, so a breed in VBO can be matched to its entry in each of them.
And where each breed came from.
For many breeds, VBO records the foundation stock: the breeds that were crossed and selected to create this one. The Labrador traces back to the Curly Coated Retriever, the Flat-Coated Retriever, and the now-extinct Tweed Water Spaniel. This is documented lineage, written down from breeding records, not inferred from a genome. It is the right kind of source for the question of what a breed is related to, and the whole thing is released under CC-BY 4.0.
What VBO contributes to Sniff
VBO is the backbone of breed identity across the whole site. 147 breeds in Sniff carry a VBO entry.
The "Names and origins" section on every breed page is VBO: the alternate names (135 breeds), the "what it was built from" lineage linked breed to breed (63 breeds), the registry IDs (144 breeds), and the breed's own VBO term, linked out so you can see the canonical record. Behind the scenes, the VBO identifier is what each breed is published as in our structured metadata, so a machine reading Sniff can resolve a breed to its canonical ontology term.
VBO also fixed something we got wrong. The honest answer to "what breeds are related to this one" is documented lineage and kennel-group taxonomy, not raw genetic distance, because two breeds can sit close in the genome and be nothing alike. VBO's foundation-stock relationships are one of the two governed sources Sniff uses for related breeds. It is a large part of why that feature is trustworthy.
And VBO is the hinge between breeds and disease. It is the shared breed identity that lets an OMIA disease record, annotated by breed, land on the right breed page in Sniff. The breed catalogue and the disease catalogue meet through VBO, as standard nodes and edges in our Biolink-compatible knowledge graph, so the whole thing composes with the wider biomedical-ontology ecosystem instead of sitting in a silo.
The Vertebrate Breed Ontology is built and maintained by the Monarch Initiative, led by Kathleen R. Mullen and Sabrina Toro, in collaboration with OMIA. It is openly licensed under CC-BY 4.0 and developed in the open on GitHub. We honor that license: VBO is credited here, cited on every breed page, and linked back to the canonical term.
Sniff is not affiliated with the Monarch Initiative. We are grateful for the work. Standardizing the world's breed names is exactly the kind of patient, foundational infrastructure that everything downstream, including Sniff, quietly depends on.
Browse the VBO ontology on OLS ↗
Citation: Mullen, K. R., Tammen, I., Matentzoglu, N. A., Mather, M., Balhoff, J. P., Esdaile, E., Leroy, G., Park, C. A., Rando, H. M., Saklou, N. T., Webb, T. L., Vasilevsky, N. A., Mungall, C. J., Haendel, M. A., Nicholas, F. W., & Toro, S. (2025). The Vertebrate Breed Ontology: Toward Effective Breed Data Standardization. Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, 39(4), e70133. doi:10.1111/jvim.70133. CC-BY 4.0.