Add abbreviations to more specific techniques where possible

gkoum commented 4 months ago

Since abbreviations seem to be the most used terms between scientists we need to have a complete list encoded in the ontology. They need to exist in the more specific techniques that we will assign to beamlines. We need to decide:

if we need abbreviations to be unique or not.
the annotation property we will use to host them

Probably we cannot be sure that abbreviations are unique and sometimes more than one can be assigned to a specific technique. Also regarding the property that we can use it is a good idea to have a new DataType property :hasAbbreviation (string) as well as use a skos:altLabel to keep abbreviations. In that way the ontology is compatible with SKOS-enabled tools and reasoners (for concept matching, synonym discovery etc) and can also be used with custom reasoners that take into account our DataType property. We should not be afraid to repeat the information in several fields in an ontology if this improves interoperability and improves semantics.

For now in ESRF we use a unreliable script to collect all abbreviations for all classes and produce a dictionary for the scientists to select and provide information to ICAT and the NeXus file:

UVCD: {'acronym': 'UVCD', 'names': ['UV circular dichroism'], 'panetid': 'http://purl.org/pan-science/PaNET/PaNET01132'}
VSANS: {'acronym': 'VSANS', 'names': ['very small angle neutron scattering'], 'panetid': 'http://purl.org/pan-science/PaNET/PaNET01278'}
WAXS: {'acronym': 'WAXS', 'names': ['wide angle x-ray scattering'], 'panetid': 'http://purl.org/pan-science/PaNET/PaNET01191'}
XAFS: {'acronym': 'XAFS', 'names': ['x-ray absorption fine structure'], 'panetid': 'http://purl.org/pan-science/PaNET/PaNET01197'}
XANES: {'acronym': 'XANES', 'names': ['x-ray absorption near edge structure'], 'panetid': 'http://purl.org/pan-science/PaNET/PaNET01199'}

gkoum commented 4 months ago

Builds on top of #82

gkoum commented 4 months ago

Example of the effort being made with acronyms in ESRF: https://gitlab.esrf.fr/dau/ontology/esrf-ontology/-/issues/5

ExPaNDS-eu / ExPaNDS-experimental-techniques-ontology

Add abbreviations to more specific techniques where possible #108