Best practice for referring to external terms and ontologies

[sneumann]

Hi, people generally like the idea of using controlled terminology in properties, and we have wonderful ontologies in OBO and elsewhere. However, multiple approaches with their own pros/cons exist to capture and link to the external terminologies. This is the place to collect use cases, examples and discuss the approaches.

[gtsueng]

Some related issues to help jump-start the discussion:

• Request to extend Expected Types for property measurementTechnique with Type DefinedTerm #594
• Properties that take an URL in anticipation of an external enumeration should be marked as expecting DefinedTerm schemaorg/schemaorg#2734

[ljgarcia]

Adding DefinedTerm to measurementTechnique as possible expected type could have unintended consequences as it is not part of schema.org Will it break, e.g., Google Dataset validation?

[marco-brandizi]

This is also related to attaching ontology qualifiers to PropertyValue instances, see schemaorg/schemaorg#2986 and #538. Within the Agrischemas and MIAPPE-2-bioschemas projects, we're currently using dc:type to link ontology terms, see here.

[ljgarcia]

But this would only work if PropertyValue is allowed within the range of the property, right?

[ljgarcia]

@sneumann as this discussion goes beyond the Bioschemas community, i.e., it would require changes in schema.org, I created an issue there. Hopefully we can make a change.

[ljgarcia]

Here is the list of types and their properties where DefinedTerm could be added to the expected range

• FormalParameter: encodingFormat (it already suggests using EDAM which is a DefinedTerm from schema.org perspective)
• ComputationalTool: applicationCategory and applicationSubCategory (DefinedTerm in addition to Text and URL, EDAM is already suggested), featureList (in addition to Text and URL), keywords (DefinedTerm exists in schema.org, should not be removed), operatingSystem, programmingLanguage
• ComputationalWorkflow: encodingFormat
• CourseInstance: courseMode, eventStatus
• DataCatalog: keywords, encodingFormat
• Dataset: measurementTechnique, variableMeasured