Display of ontology license information on OLS web inconsistent?

[SArndt-TIB]

At TIB we are working towards having several OLS instances running to provide a look up service to the many ontologies used throughout its labs and projects.

We recently encountered an inconsistency on how the license information from ontologies indexed by OLS frontend (ols-web) gets rendered (or not).

We understood that an ontology's displayed license is fetched from the ontology owl/ttl Dublin Core dct:license or dct:rights property. However we are seeing inconsistencies, resulting in the license being displayed or not [3], or if the full license URL is shown or only the version [4].

What causes this and how can it be fixed?

Another related question, is whether the license information is needed in the ontologies configuration file obo-config.yaml, if this information is gathered from the ontology owl?

Compare the following examples:

terminology service	ontologyIRI/ versionIRI	source code	picture	comment
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/ontologies/amphx	https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EBISPOT/amphx_ontology/v2020-12-18/amphx.owl	<terms:license rdf:resource="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"/>	[1]
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/ontologies/cido	http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/cido.owl	<terms:license>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</terms:license>	[2]
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/ontologies/ddpheno	http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ddpheno/releases/2020-06-19/ddpheno.owl	<terms:license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/"/>	[3]
https://service.tib.eu/ts4tib/ontologies/seas	https://ci.mines-stetienne.fr/seas/ThermodynamicSystemOntology-1.0	<dcterms:license rdf:resource="https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0"/>	[4]	In the config file (obo-config.yaml) for our implementation, the license information is given as shown by [5]

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

license:
    url: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
    label: Apache 2.0

We would appreciate if someone could offer some clarification on this issue. Thank you

[jamesamcl]

Example [2] is wrong, because the range of dcterms:license is dcterms:LicenseDocument, not Literal.

All of the other examples should work. I will look into this.

[henrietteharmse]

We have looked into this issue briefly. It seems the problem stems from the fact that OLS does not deal explicitly will license related annotations (as it deals with for example version- or creator annotations), but rather detects it accidentally as part of the arbitrary ontology annotations.

Given our current roadmap we will only be able to get to this issue by the end of June. If you need this rather urgently you welcome to implement a fix (similar to how we deal with the creator annotation) for this and to submit a pull request when ready.

[giraygi]

We have looked into this issue briefly. It seems the problem stems from the fact that OLS does not deal explicitly will license related annotations (as it deals with for example version- or creator annotations), but rather detects it accidentally as part of the arbitrary ontology annotations.

Given our current roadmap we will only be able to get to this issue by the end of June. If you need this rather urgently you welcome to implement a fix (similar to how we deal with the creator annotation) for this and to submit a pull request when ready. Hi @henrietteharmse I have implemented our solution to this as a pull request to you in https://github.com/EBISPOT/OLS/pull/535 . You can see more or less how it looks like here: https://service.tib.eu/ts4tib/ontologies/dices I just didn't reflect some of our simple styling such as line spacing and the way we give creator title in the config panel.