The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to OccO. These guidelines are not strict rules. Use your best judgment, and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request.
Please use our Issue Tracker for reporting problems with the ontology. To learn how to write a good issue see here.
Before you write a new request, please consider the following:
- Does the term already exist? Before submitting suggestions for new ontology terms, check whether the term exist, either as a primary term or a synonym term. You can search for your term using Ontobee or OLS.
- Can you provide a definition for the term? It should be very clear what the term means, and you should be able to provide a concise definition, ideally with a scientific reference.
- Is the ontology in scope for the term? Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether a term "belongs" in and ontology. A rule of thumb is "if a similar term already exists, the new term is probably in scope." It can be very helpful to mention a very similar concept as part of the term request!
Anyone can request new terms. However, there is not guarantee that your term will be added automatically. Since this is a community resource, it is often necessary to do at least some of the work of adding the term yourself, see below.
Request a new term via the GitHub Issue Tracker.
It is important to remember that it takes a lot of time for curators to process issues submitted to the tracker. To make this work easier, please always use issue templates if they are available (https://github.com/Occupation-Ontology/OccO/issues/new/choose).
For how to write a good term request, please read the best practices carefully.
If you have never edited an ontology before, first follow a general tutorial
Process: Check OccO editing wiki page
Please refer to the OBO Academy best practices.
Please refer to the OBO Academy best practices