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Add validation of textual definitions to OAK

Open cmungall opened this issue 2 years ago • 1 comments

The following paper https://philpapers.org/archive/SEPGFW.pdf lays out guidelines for definitions in ontologies

I summarized these here: https://douroucouli.wordpress.com/2019/07/08/ontotip-write-simple-concise-clear-operational-textual-definitions/

Validation of a lot of these could be semi-automated;

e.g.

  • S1: conform to conventions (do not include definiendum at the start)
  • S3: Use the genus differentia form (basic matching of text patterns)
  • S7: Avoid circularity (text match to see if definition includes the definiendum)
  • S11: Match text and logical definitions (performed using the text annotator interface)

Any validation would likely be highly sensitive test with a lot of things people would consider false positives due to natural lexical variation and style preferences etc. We could think of this as being an extremely opinionated "black" for ontologies.

Where would such a library belong?

  1. In OAK (in validator interface)?
  2. As a separate ontology library that depends on OAK?

The argument for 1 is that we already have structural checks (validation against LinkML OMO schema), some minimal lexical checks, reasoner checks (using robot plugin) in here already, so it is convenient and coherent to have a one stop shop.

cmungall avatar Oct 10 '22 15:10 cmungall

On slack @gouttegd pointed me at some scripts in FlyBase for punctuation/spell checking - made a separate issue for this:

  • #306

cmungall avatar Oct 10 '22 15:10 cmungall