20170619 Ontology Change Improvement Call

Date: June 19: 2017

Attendees: Marijane White, Brian Lowe, Juliane Schneider, Christian Hauschke, DJ Lee, Muhammed Javed

Agenda:

Marijane: ISF seems to be broken. Some subclasses are missing. Not sure why.

Javed: Did create Vue diagram, in the google drive, same as shown last time we met. Mike sent OWL file from the VIVO application, going to compare with public ontology.

Marijane: Talked to Dave Eichmann, his data refresh should be finished by now, will talk to him tomorrow.

Brian: Do we know the scope of the brokenness?

Marijane: Not really. People subclasses are missing.

Brian: Can shed some light on this. The plan for the ISF was that for the next release, shortly thereafter, that the person subclasses were going to be dropped in favor of roles, so the fact that they are missing is intentional. May want to bring them back in and deprecate them.

Marijane: ok, so not so much broken, just unfinished.

Brian: yeah. Not very well documented or communicated.

Marijane: This at least feels in line with BFO.

Brian: Backlash to 1.6 prevented further changes. Changeover never happened because of political reasons.

Marijane: position statement on changing ontology - we shouldn't make breaking changes. Furthermore, we should put things back in that were taken out, and deprecate them. Update ontology to keep legacy data and tools still working.

Javed: First thing we have to do is fix the ontology. Then we need a strategy to update the ontology. Then we need to make a small impact change. Once we go through that process, then we can think about fixing big things.

Marijane: How do we deal with the fact that the ISF doesn't have the classes? Is that a big change, or what?

Javed: Adding the classes back feels like an appropriate thing to do first.

Juliane: Identify what needs fixing and prioritize.

Marijane: how do we do that?

Javed: First check for existence of any class or property, whether they exist or don't exist Then, check axioms for existence. Class part is done, axioms still need to be done.

Marijane: proposed a process based on eagle-i update process while Javed recorded in a Google doc.

Javed: Who are these people filing the issues and reviewing requests?

Marijane: we need volunteers. I will volunteer.

Juliane: I am willing once I figure more of this stuff out.

side convo about ironing issues out with eagle-i release

Christian: question about step one of the process

Marijane: how about a quorum to approve? Make it easy, two people?

Javed: needs to be discussed by the community, more people

Marijane: How about notifying mailing lists? vivo-tech and openrif-dev

What else do we need in this process?

Christian: Need to notify the internationalization TF. Need a few weeks headway before a release.

Marijane: Agreed. Might not be as simple as labels but very important.

where to start? simple changes?

Javed: Let's bring it into alignment with the public owl file first.

We also need to identify the people who will be doing this.

Marijane: I will send out an email to vivo-tech and openrif-dev to call for volunteers, committers and reviewers.