Suggestions on additional scope?

[kaiiam]

@matentzn cc @ddooley @ramonawalls @cooperl09 @cmungall @diatomsRcool @LilyAndres @CropStoreDb

Thanks @matentzn for outlining the ongoing efforts to model patterns for traits and phenotypes in this repo. The following are some thoughts/observations about similar uses of design patterns patterns across OBO projects to address parameters which conceptually (and from a modeling perspective) are similar to traits and phenotypes.

The Plant Trait Ontology (TO) has content terms, e.g, root system lead content xref Planteome/plant-trait-ontology#456, following a DOSDP which is almost identical to the chemical concentration DOSDP pattern used in the Environment Ontology (ENVO), e.g, concentration of cobalt in snow.

The Crop Dietary Nutrition Ontology (CDNO) is a new OBO ontology which hosts terms like concentration of maltose in plant structure providing IRIs by which to link to food standards organization vocabularies (e.g. USDA). Recently, there has been discussion there of making concentration terms for chemicals in foods i.e. FOODON terms (or OBI organism) xref CompositionalDietaryNutritionOntology/cdno#51. CDNO hosting FOODON concentration terms would be analogous to the TO hosting content terms with links to PO classes.

Maybe some of ECTO's DOSDP modules would also fall under this broader trait/phenotype/parameters umbrella as well?

Perhaps it's desirable for each of these domains and systems to host their separate modules, but maybe there's value in making sure this is all coordinated and or maybe even unified one day? I'm imagining one system we can point non-ontologists especially data managers too and say find terms for your data here instead of a large collection of acronyms OBA TO ENVO ECTO etc. Especially if one day we can connect it to the new units system @jamesaoverton myself and others are working on, as it will eventually need to handle cases like mg{blood glucose concentration}/mL. The {} being a UCUM (Unified Code for Units of Measure) style an annotation (widely used in healthcare systems) upon which the new unit system is based and to which we'd want to link to an appropriate OBO parameter/phenotype/trait term. Having these trait/parameter efforts well coordinated (or possibly unified) would greatly help in linking the new units system to appropriate terms.

[matentzn]

@marieALaporte
@caripark
@dosumis