Feature request: Remember labels

[alanruttenberg]

It's a common experience when using opaque IRIs, such as those used with OBO, combined with omission of imports that opaque IRIs will be displayed in the hierarchy and axioms, causing confusion.

I propose that Protege keep a database mapping IRIs to labels, updated each time it opens an ontology that provides those labels. Then, subject to a preference, if a label is not available, the last known label could be used for display, perhaps with an indication of its status. This database would be constructed on the fly as the user opens different ontologies.

Extra credit for going beyond rdfs:label and recording associations to all common label properties as well as an property that is seen at some point as a subproperty of rdfs:label. That way there's also the possibility of respecting the priority order for label display preference.

[alanruttenberg]

An easier but still useful alternative would be to be able to specify a file with URLs and labels to be used in the case that the ontology doesn't have a label.

[gouttegd]

I don’t really see such a feature happening in the foreseeable future, but I do like the idea, provided that:

• it is immediately obvious that the label comes from such a database, rather than from the ontology itself (I presume that’s what you mean by “an indication of its status”), and
• the behaviour can be disabled (presumably the appropriate place to configure this would be in the “entity rendering” options).