OBOFoundry
Principle 1 guidelines for ‘imported from’
Principle 1 indicates (on the topic of individual term re-use) that the importing ontology SHOULD tag each imported term with IAO:0000412 'imported from'. The reason given was so that a user could find more information about the license that governs the term.
During the OBO Operations call 2025-10-14, at which an in-development 'miscellaneous guidelines' page was discussed, the topic of tagging terms with 'imported from' came up. The conclusion was that we should NOT recommend such tagging (nor should we recommend against it). The reason(s) for not recommending was not fully captured in the minutes, but it was noted that while OntoFox automatically adds this tag to imported terms, ROBOT only does so when prompted.
The question here is whether the principle ought to keep the current wording or be revised. The revision could either be to change the SHOULD to MAY, or to remove the mention completely.
I am not 100% sure if this only applies to axioms, but arent we mostly using rdfs:isDefinedBy? cc @balhoff
I am not 100% sure if this only applies to axioms, but arent we mostly using
rdfs:isDefinedBy? cc @balhoff
I think so. I didn't realize there was an IAO term!
James proposes that we drop "Any ontology re-using individual terms from another ontology should: use an IAO:imported from annotation http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_0000412 on each imported term to link back to the group (i.e. ontology) maintaining it, where more information would be available about the license" (1.2 under For ontology re-use). https://obofoundry.org/principles/fp-001-open.html
EWG will make modifications and create a pull request.
