Addition of OBO shorthands to the RO mirror: to preserve?

[gouttegd]

When mirroring RO (prior to merging it into the merged_import.owl module), we currently give it some special treatment:

# Probably no reason to merge them first
# --add-obo-shorthand-to-properties: remove this to add mappings into remove
mirror/ro.owl: mirror/bspo.owl mirror-ro | $(MIRRORDIR)
    if [ $(MIR) = true ] && [ $(IMP) = true ]; then $(OWLTOOLS_NO_CAT) $(URIBASE)/ro.owl $< --merge-support-ontologies --merge-imports-closure --add-obo-shorthand-to-properties -o $@ && touch $@; fi

The above rule does two things:

• it merges the RO mirror with the BSPO mirror (which, at the comment suggests, serves no purpose; all mirrors will be merged as part of the process of creating the merged_import.owl module anyway);
• it adds any missing “OBO shorthands” to the mirror (and about that, I am not sure what this comment means: “remove this to add mappings into remove”???).

Is the addition of “OBO shorthands” something we want/need to preserve here? If so, at some point we’ll need to figure out a way to do that without Owltools’ --add-obo-shorthands-to-properties, since ultimately we want to phase out our reliance on Owltools.

Related: #3014 (where we also make use of Owltools’ --add-obo-shorthands-to-properties)

[gouttegd]

• In six months nobody showed up to make a case for keeping the addition of OBO shorthands here.
• In #3014 we ultimately decided to get rid of the custom rule that (among other things) also added OBO shorthands, and nobody complained.

I am strongly inclined to remove the special treatment of the OBO mirror (no more addition of OBO shorthands, no more use of Owltools) and treat it like all other mirrors, with the standard ODK-generated rules.

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