Submitted to the faculty of Indiana University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Science in the School of Informatics Indiana University December 2005 / This project addresses the need for an increased expressivity and robustness of ontologies already supporting BACIIS and SIBIOS, two systems for data and service integration in the life sciences. The previous ontology solutions as global schema and facilitator of service discovery sustained the purposes for which they were built to provide, but were in need of updating in order to keep up with more recent standards in ontology descriptions and utilization as well as increase the breadth of the domain and expressivity of the content. Thus, several tasks were undertaken to increase the worth of the system ontologies. These include an upgrade to a more recent ontology language standard, increased domain coverage, and increased expressivity via additions of relationships and hierarchies within the ontology as well as increased ease of maintenance by a distributed design.