cmungall
commented
4 years ago We should remove all vague weasely language like "following the pattern of...". I think this may have originally inserted with the temporal patterns of the 2005 RO paper in mind.
Also the goal of "unambiguous" is laudable, but this is one of these things that are easy to pick apart, so is essentially useless as a criterion.
Let's think of what we want out of this principle from the ground up. We already have ontologies like OBI that mint their own relations. There are pros and cons of this but the point is it's an ongoing conversation between domain ontologies, core, and ro. (See also discussion of modularization strategy here https://github.com/oborel/obo-relations/wiki/ROModules).
We also have some ontologies that mint new URIs for which equivalent RO relations already exist. Or that are in the scope of RO.
We will also need to update this principle when core matures, but for now I suggest:
Each OBO ontology MUST reuse existing relations (aka object properties) that have already been declared, rather than declaring duplicative relations. Here by reuse, we mean that the actual PURL is used. In some cases it may make sense for an ontology to declare a new relation in its own ID space. In these cases, there SHOULD still be coordination with RO, for example in the form of an issue submitted to the RO tracker
nataled
ramonawalls
nlharris
Principle 7: “The ontology uses relations which are unambiguously defined following the pattern of definitions laid down in the OBO Relation Ontology.”
From RO: RO is a collection of relations intended primarily for standardization across ontologies in the OBO Foundry and wider OBO library. It incorporates ROCore upper-level relations such as part of as well as biology-specific relationship types such as develops from.
From OBO site: The ontology uses relations which are unambiguously defined following the pattern of definitions laid down in the OBO Relation Ontology.