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Policy for OBO namespace and associated PURL requests

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Melanie Courtot edited this page Oct 21, 2015 · 1 revision

HOWTO request a prefix and domain for a new resource

This policy has been formally adopted on April 19th 2013. Do not edit this page without consulting with the OBO Technical group. Comments to [email protected]

Background

Identifiers are managed by giving requesting projects a series of numerical ids that have a common prefix, sometimes known as a namespace. For example, a project might request and obtain the prefix "MOBO". The ontology would then use ids of the form http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/MOBO_0000001 , http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/MOBO_0000002 ...

In order to ensure that there is no prefix redundancy, i.e. only one project/resource is using the namespace "MOBO", these are allocated by the OBO Foundry technical working group.

The technical working group reserves the right to make decisions based on their experience and judgement. In addition to uniqueness of prefixes, other criteria are for example that there not be overlaps of usage. This includes awareness that there can be the appearance of overlap between accession numbers used in databases and prefixed URIs. For example, we would probably not create a prefix "ISBN" and would instead make alternative suggestions.

Process

OBO

  1. While there are no review requirements, participation in the OBO Foundry implies willingness to discuss your project and collaboratively develop it. You are strongly encouraged to build upon the existing suite of ontologies available in the OBO library.
  2. We recommend projects be orthogonal to each other (i.e., no domain overlap). For those classes that are common across multiple resources (e.g., the class cell) we recommend importing terms from an already existing ontology. At a minimum, we expect attribution of existing work.

Requestor

  1. You will get a PURL for your main file under the OBO PURL domain as well as a PURL domain. You will be part of the administrator group for those resources. Please familiarize yourself with the PURL guide at http://code.google.com/p/obo-foundry-operations-committee/wiki/PURLGuide .
  2. As of today (April 7th, 2013), when your prefix is registered it is automatically included for display on the OBO Foundry site. This may change in the future as we modify our registration system.
  3. Once your domain is created under OBO you will automatically benefit from our dereferencing tool Ontobee. If preferred you can, of course, redirect your pages towards your own web pages.
  4. Please keep the OBO PURL group (group ID: OBO) to the maintainers/members of your PURL group

Status of ontology development

  1. A project should exist, with work started. We will not "pre-book" prefixes and domains for potential future resources.
  2. The required namespace must be available.
  3. The resource must be publicly available when released.
  4. There must be a contact person for the resource. We ask that the contact person for resources be subscribed to our main communication channel, the obo-discuss list.
  5. The requestor and/or contact person should be ready to discuss issues such as whether the ontology is orthogonal, whether there is potential to collaborate with existing efforts.
  6. It is expected that solicitation of a prefix is done before the prefix is used for identifiers. A common strategy is to develop an ontology, request a prefix, and translate the initial URIs used to the PURLs some time before the initial release. There is no guarantee that you will be granted your prefix, even if you have been using it in your file.

Information needed for a prefix request

  • requested prefix
  • ontology title
  • ontology download link
  • ontology home page
  • point person contact email
  • ontology discussion mailing-list
  • ontology issue tracker link
  • purl.org user ID - please register there if you don't have one

Requesting the prefix

The requests proceeds in 2 steps:

  1. First send an email to obo-discuss with your request to allow community feedback (you may need to register first)

  2. Submit your request to our tracker at http://code.google.com/p/obo-foundry-operations-committee/issues/entry?template=Prefix/Domain%20creation

We expect general discussion to take place on the obo-discuss list, while technical follow-up will take place on the tracker.

Example of such request:

Response

Allocate 2 weeks to give members of the community time to provide feedback and for the operations committee to act on the request. We will usually respond on the tracker ticket and acknowledge your request/provide a tentative creation date. If you don't hear back from us after 2 weeks, please send a note to the [email protected] or request follow-up via the tracker ticket.

For more information

For instructions on how to create the prefix/domain at purl.org, or to understand how the OBO PURL domain/redirection works, see http://code.google.com/p/obo-foundry-operations-committee/wiki/OBOPURLDomain

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