Subject agnostic: annotation choices and placement within SRAO

FAIRsharing / subject-ontology

A project supporting the SRAO application ontology, a hierarchy of academic disciplines that imports subsets of terms from 7 publicly-available ontologies.

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Subject agnostic: annotation choices and placement within SRAO #15

Closed Drosophilic closed 2 years ago

Drosophilic commented 5 years ago

We used to have a user-defined tag called 'General Purpose', which was used for standards that were applicable to every subject. This has now disappeared. We need to consider whether it is useful to reinstate this term. We also need to ensure that no data is lost when a term such as this disappears, e.g. new terms are created and all records annotated with the original terms are reviewed and new user tags are added if necessary.

allysonlister commented 5 years ago

Please note that this tag hasn't been deleted, but has been put in the "Needs Discussion" part of the user-defined tags list (not currently stored in this repository). It is therefore a User-defined tag right now, and not an ontology term. I agree that we need to decide where it goes, long term, and indeed if it should remain.

Drosophilic commented 5 years ago

Yes, by 'loss' I meant from the ontology. We should discuss this at the next call.

Drosophilic commented 5 years ago

We will discuss this in person with Susanna at our meeting in Oxford in January.

Drosophilic commented 5 years ago

We have decided to add 'General Purpose' as a high level term alongside Natural Sciences, Humanities and so on. We still need to decide how we will annotate this term. For example, should XML be annotated with General Purpose alone, or also Computer Science? How will we handle Computer Science formats when many could legitimately be considered 'General Purpose'?

allysonlister commented 2 years ago

Please note that if we add this as a sibling term to the other top-level terms in SRAO it will mean something semantically different from if it is the top level term.

sibling term: will not have any other terms as part of its hierarchy; will be standalone. Benefits: it can mean something beyond just "all research areas" and could instead mean "all types of digital objects", for example
top-level term: we would be only using it to describe all research areas together.

Whatever the choice, it will have consequences both for users of SRAO and how it is implemented within FAIRsharing.

allysonlister commented 2 years ago

After additional discussion, we have decided to proceed with this work, however the term as added to FAIRsharing will be ~~Domain~~ Subject Agnostic. This will reflect its purpose as being a sibling to all other top-level SRAO terms, and fits with the idea that it sits separate from the rest of the subject area hierarchy. The consequences of this decision are such that:

Searches with e.g. "Biology" would not return Subject Agnostic records (unless, clearly, the Subject Agnostic term is also included in the search), and
Subject Agnostic would only return Subject Agnostic-tagged records, not records tagged with anything else elsewhere in the hierarchy (e.g. searching Subject Agnostic would not return a record that is just tagged with Biology).

Before we proceed with this work, we need to review the current status of the General Purpose tag within FAIRsharing and ensure curation is in line with this behaviour described above.

allysonlister commented 2 years ago

I have reviewed all uses of "General Purpose" within FAIRsharing and am ready to incorporate Subject Agnostic within SRAO.

allysonlister commented 2 years ago

I have reviewed the very few (<30 records) instances where all three top-level terms have been included, and updated their tag annotation accordingly. This does mean that between now and the incorporation of this SRAO release, there will be (in some cases) no subject tags, but this is only temporary.