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information-artifact-ontology / IAO

information artifact ontology
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Why not use imports? #229

Closed aucampia closed 4 years ago

aucampia commented 4 years ago

This ontology seems to not be importing other ontologies it uses like BFO but instead "duplicating" then, is there a reason for this? Could it be changed to use imports instead?

jamesaoverton commented 4 years ago

The iao-edit.owl file shows how IAO imports BFO and some external ontology terms into the editor's version of the ontology. When the main iao.owl file is prepared for release, all the imports are merged, reasoning is done, and the result is a single self-contained OWL file, sometimes called a "full" release file in the OBO community.

OBO projects are starting to also publish "base" release files, which link to external terms without including them in the file. This might be what you're after. IAO doesn't yet publish a base file, but you could build one with ROBOT.

Full files and base files each have advantages for different applications.