Relations

The Relations branch of the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations

Overview

The relations branch of OBI is a open forum for the discussion and implementation of ontology relations for OBI. The OBI calendar lists the regular branch calls and face-to-face developers meetings. The OBI mailing lists including the relations mailing list are listed here.

Editors

• Larisa Soldatova (Lead editor)
• Frank Gibson
• Melanie Courtot
• Alan Ruttenberg
• Cristian Cocos
• Larry Hunter
• Bjoern Peters
• Barry Smith

Relation conference call agenda

The current conference call agenda, along with previous call minutes can be found on the relations branch agenda

Relations in OBI

As far as possible OBI tries to re-use existing ontology relations. Specifically, OBI uses the relations in the Relation Ontology. Additional relations that OBI requires are either imported from existing resources, if available, or created specifically for OBI. OBI imports specfic relations from these resources:

1. The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO): Contained in
2. The proposed relations of the RO (RO_proposed): Contained in external-by-hand.owl.

OBI specific relations are created in the Relations.owl file.

A wiki version of the relations used in OBI are displayed on the list of the relations page.

Relations development procedure

The OBI project is using the OBO relation ontology (RO). The following process represents how a relation is accepted in the OBI Relations.owl

1. A relation is proposed via the mailing list or issue tracker.
   1. The proposed relation is accompanied by a case study describing its potential use.
   2. The proposed relation is accompanied by a definition
   3. The proposed relation is accompanied by proposed domain and range for the relation.
2. If the relation is in the RO, then it is available for use.
3. If the relation is not in the RO, then the RO_proposed is checked to see if the relation exists there.
4. If the relation is in RO_proposed then it is manually included in the OBI file external-by-hand.owl. This can be considered as a MIREOT import of a relation: we use the file external-byhand as ro_proposed is currently not loaded on Neurocommons. Note: the file external-byhand.owl contains other things (those that are not automatically retrievable via sparql query on the Neurocommons triple store)
5. If the relation is neither in RO or RO_proposed then the relation is incuded in the OBI file Relations.owl
6. Every relation in Relations.owl is in effect a proposal for inclusion into the RO.
7. If a relation that is in RO_proposed or in OBI Relations.owl is accepted in the RO, then OBI uses this version of the relation rather than the relation contained in external-by-hand or Relations.owl, as OBI imports the Relation Ontology.