add .description field to massmodel class

[jtyurkovich]

There needs to be a model.description field that contains a human-readable string of metadata associated with the model. This string would describe (ideally) what system the model represents, what type of model it is, what sort of content is represented, etc.

[z-haiman]

Is there a reason we would prefer to use this over the notes or annotation fields that exist in objects in general?

[jtyurkovich]

Hmm well I was going to suggest that we use it because cobrapy and COBRA Toolbox do, but apparently that is now deprecated?

https://github.com/opencobra/cobrapy/blob/devel/cobra/core/model.py#L151

So maybe using notes is fine...

[z-haiman]

Do you know if there is a post that explains why it was deprecated?

I'm fine adding in a description field, I honestly haven't thought enough about it. I know I was planning on encouraging the use of the notes field as a dictionary with a key called "Literature" so we can have references used for building that model stored inside the model.

So we could encourage using "description" as a key in the notes dict as well if there is a good reason for deprecating it in COBRA.

[jtyurkovich]

I personally prefer a description field, because in my mind it is separate from a notes field. To me, notes is what you say (literature, design decisions) while description is more high-level metadata (organism, scope of model).

[z-haiman]

That makes sense to me, I'll merge it in.