EnvironmentOntology / envo

A community-driven ontology for the representation of environments
http://www.environmentontology.org
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Suggested revisions for ENVO-SWEET sssom file #1409

Open cmungall opened 1 year ago

cmungall commented 1 year ago

This SSSOM was introduced in

Many thanks for this!

Some issues, syntactic and content:

rduerr commented 1 year ago

Much larger problem recently discovered. That is that the labels for SWEET have capitals and no spaces. That needs to be fixed! I'll try to do that later this week, if someone can tell me what to do about the syntactic things mentioned above (not an ontologist, more a data manager).

As for having more exact matches, we deliberately did not assume that two terms were the same when one of them (the SWEET term) had neither a definition nor any commitments at all (SWEET practically has nothing beyond a hierarchy which in general is very different from ENVO's). Saying that something that literally has no meaning is equivalent to something that has both a definition and some commitments seems totally silly to me; especially when you find out later that the term (say for example calf) in SWEET literally meant a baby cow and in ENVO it meant a chunk of ice that fell off a bigger chunk of ice. More over, the SWEET community has decided to make it a hub for multiple definitions from various glossaries, etc. so it isn't clear that the terms in SWEET are actually concepts at this point. In any case, I presume that as SWEET and ENVO both evolve, the mapping will have to evolve too...

In the example given, SWEET was updated to use ENVO's definition; but now this is suspect given the re-purposing of SWEET that has happened. This probably should be an issue in SWEET at this point (to undo the work that had been done during the harmonization process before the SWEET direction change was made).

I don't get the bit about completeness... What does that mean?

Lastly, the example sssom file I am following doesn't have versions, so I am not sure what to do about the following:

rduerr commented 1 year ago

To DO:

cmungall commented 1 year ago

I am not sure the baby cow analogy holds, in this case the intended meaning is obvious from parentage.

In the example given, SWEET was updated to use ENVO's definition; but now this is suspect given the re-purposing of SWEET that has happened.

Do you have any more context on this? I haven't heard of any re-purposing but I haven't been following the tracker closely

rduerr commented 1 year ago

The person to talk to here is @brandonnodnarb (I think that is Brandon Whitehead's github id) who is the current chair of the ESIP Semantic Technology Committee; though I note that his term is up later this month and it is likely that Marshall Ma will be the new chair. So who knows if that will change anything.

The committee decided that given how lightweight SWEET is on definitions and axioms, that it would make the most sense to repurpose it to sort of connect a bunch of earth science vocabularies together by associating each term in SWEET with the definitions from each of those other vocabularies (of which there are likely hundred's) , so someone using a SWEET term could see all the other terms (including IRI's) and their definitions. The hope was that this would spur folks to take a look at all these various definitions and clean things up!!! Has that happened - well, some of it but not a lot... So I don't know where this is going to go... Without funding, probably nowhere.