tighten definition of IAO:0000233 term tracker item

[cmungall]

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/IAO_0000233

An IRI or similar locator for a request or discussion of an ontology term.

What is a "similar locator"?

There is no range specified for this AP

IMO this should be strictly restricted to URLs to make it all useful. Otherwise it may as well be crammed into a comment. We are not dublin core.

For example, if we want code in OAK that validates IAO:0000233 by checking if a URL is valid (and using OAK-LLM to check if the content of the tracker aligns with the term) this will break if fed non URLs. The code would need to do bespoke parsing of the value.

Currently on OBO there are 229 uses of this

• 57 uses of relative locators (#NNN). This is bad practice. URLs should be used
• Multiple cases of clear errors from GO @balhoff
• rest are valid uses of issue or PR URLs

However, one non-OBO ontology, OEO is using this in a slightly different way, with a range of string with multiple URLs embedded

If we were to go with my recommendation this would break things for them, so we need to coordinate. cc @jannahastings

I think this speaks to the need to be simple and clear in OMO definitions, if the metadata is to be at all usable in a consistent way. It's always much harder to fix this after the fact once terms are in the wild and we later discover everyone is using them differently

[matentzn]

I agree with your suggestions:

1. tighten range of IAO:0000223 to URL
2. Change definition to "A URI or URL of a an issue tracker item related to this term"

[jannahastings]

Looping in @stap-m for OEO coordination

[stap-m]

Thanks for informing us. We'll think of a solution and update the usage of the term tracker item annotation in OEO.