ROAndBFO
This page describes the current status of interoperation between RO and BFO
RO historically use of BFO in two ways:
- Upper level classes from BFO are used to make constraints such as domain/range on relations
- RO ceded "core" relations such as part_of to BFO
This plan was conceived in 2010 before the release of BFO2. At the time of writing (March 2013), the current BFO2 proposal is to use so-called 'temporalized relations' such as http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/BFO_0000137.
At this time RO is not adopting temporalized relations. The views of one of the RO developers (cjm) is expressed in this critique of BFO2 OWL.
Instead, RO will re-use BFO2 relations that are not temporalized, and will create new relations that are not temporalized.
For example, the BFO_0000066 occurs_in relation from BFO2 OWL will be re-used directly. In contrast BFO2 OWL relations such as bearer-of-at-all-times will not be used. Instead a distinct RO relation RO_0000054 bearer-of is used.
For historic reasons, RO has made use of a small number of relations with BFO IDs. For example:
Note that these will not be incorporated into the BFO2 OWL release.
However, it should be noted that these are valid RO relations - they are defined in the RO, and will be maintained by the RO developers so long as users require them.
RO also makes use of others relations that are either uncontroversial (non-temporalized) parts of BFO2, or that will be incorporated in the future.
- BFO_0000062 preceded by (not in BFO2, but may be in the future. We assume this is the transitive form)
-
BFO_0000063 precedes
*(not in BFO2, but may be in the future. We assume this is the transitive form) - BFO_0000066 occurs_in (in BFO2)
In previous versions of RO we made use of other unofficial non-temporalized relations. To avoid potential clashes with temporalized relations with different meanings, we have decided to create separate IDs with RO prefixes:
- inheres in BFO_0000052 ==> RO_0000052
- bearer of BFO_0000053 ==> RO_0000053
- participates in BFO_0000056 ==> RO_0000056
- has participant BFO_0000057 ==> RO_0000057
The current home of these relations is in:
This is imported by the main RO
See ROCore for more details.
Note that RO should still be compatible with the classes from BFO.
The above relations import ontology imports a set of BFO classes that are a subset of the current BFO2 classes.
- TODO: resolve processural entity/process distinction
See ROAndTime