 During the forum, Pedro Mendes mentioned that modellers possessed a lot of knowledge that was necessary to understand the model, and more importantly to simulate it, but this knowledge was not encoded in SBML.Nicolas Le Novère proposed to create a controlled vocabulary to store the content of Pedro Mendes' mind before he wandered out of the community.The development of the ontology was announced more officially in a message from Le Novère to Michael Hucka and Andrew Finney on October 19.