Should ontologies submitted to OBO be rejected based on their lack of relation to biomedical domain?

[matentzn]

It is very hard to answer this question in general, as all things in the world are related, but we should add some clear guidelines somewhere that clarify this. In yesterdays OFOC call, the following suggestions were made:

• Ontologies should be at least Related to biomedical ontologies (@cstoeckert)
  • again hard to qualify what that means (@matentzn)
  • It should be possible to link to related ontologies outside of OBO from within OBO ontologies. There should not be a need to accept all related ontologies (@jamesaoverton)
• FAIR is such an important orthogonal domain that it should at least be considered (@ddooley, @addiehl)

If you have opinions for a crisp definition of the content scope of OBO ontologies, let us know!

[cthoyt]

Simple suggestion (maybe stolen from Nico?) - if the root terms don't subclass/inherit somehow from terms in COB then it's not in scope - reject it outright. Allow people whose requests don't fall under COB to have the option to petition COB to add things, but also have clear guidance there on what will be considered for COB.

[matentzn]

There are though some pretty general things is COB, like planned process. You can imagine some "crypto-currency server farm ontology" which has a bunch of planned processes in it!

[nlharris]

Are you working on that ontology, Nico?? 🤨

[nlharris]

I think what Charlie suggested above and Nico's response don't actually contradict each other.

Charlie: if (ontology NOT inherit_from COB) then (ontology NOT relevant_to OBOFoundry)
Nico: CryptoCurrencyOntology inherit_from COB
Nomi: Ok, but Charlie did not say "if (ontology inherit_from COB) then (ontology relevant_to OBOFoundry)".

ETA: but that doesn't actually solve this conundrum, because if you say to CryptoCurrencyOntology, "Sorry, you're not relevant, we reject you," they could say, "but we inherit from some COB terms!" which might be true but not good enough. So I guess I agree more with Nico. :-)

[cthoyt]

I would say that my criteria is useful, but not sufficient

[nataled]

Just dropping by to say that we have in fact done this. The one that comes to mind is "African Traditional Medicine Ontology" that was rejected (in the days before GitHub!)