Opening Ontology Issues

Issues can be opened in one of the issue trackers below. Additionally, issues received by email on a project list or to one of the ontology developers may be opened in one of the issue trackers below.

• Please use openrif/community issues for questions and ideas regarding OpenRif and the future of ontologies developed and maintained by OpenRif.

• Please use openrif/vivo-isf-ontology issues for issues related to making changes to the VIVO-ISF Ontology.

Once opened, issues are assigned to analysts to assess the impact of the proposed ontology change on the VIVO software and community.

It should be noted that all changes to tbox files will be seen by a VIVO application as a change to the ontology and will trigger full reinference of the triple store. For large sites, this can take many hours. For this reason, ontology changes should be tested on test data and smaller triple stores where reinferencing time is tolerable.

Analysts label the issues using one of three labels:

• impact low the change will have little to no impact on the VIVO software (for example, no code references the ontology element to be changed), the data (no instances of the element exist, or very few, at a small number of sites). Many "adds" to the ontology can be considered low impact.
• impact medium the change impacts areas of VIVO that are in use, but may not be common, affecting dozens of sites, of dozens of changes in the code, that would require extensive testing to insure the functionality is at or above the functionality provided before the change was made. Extensive documentation, and potential assistance to sites may be needed to help them make the change.
• impact high the change is fundamental to the way VIVO operates. Hundreds of changes to code, changes to all existing VIVO triple stores, changes to many/most queries of VIVO data. Required, extensive training, utilities and testing programs will be needed to insure all sites are able to make the required changes.

Issues without impact labels have not been reviewed by analysts.

Note Projects using the VIVO-ISF ontology likely have their own issue tracking systems and practices. Some projects may wish to link issues between systems to insure appropriate software development in support of ontological change. See VIVO Jira for issues related to the VIVO project.