[BioSQL-l] synonyms for ontology terms

[Aaron J Mackey]

I did suggest this after initially agreeing with Hilmar's proposal.

The one problem I can see is that this "well-known" predicate needs to
live in what we've been throwing around as the "CORE" ontology ... is
there really such a beast?  Can we suck it up from somewhere and declare
that when we suck up other ontologies that any synonymous relationships
use the CORE::synonymous predicate?  Perhaps instead there should be a
"biosql" namespace ontology to define some of these things (as I think
we're already defining a handful of fuzzy location terms ... ?)

-Aaron

On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Matthew Pocock wrote:

> Hi Hilmar,
>
> Would it not be better to represent this inside the ontology itself? If
> we had a well-known predicate 'synonym' then we can use the tripples
> table to associate a concept with its synonyms. This will be come just
> as efficient as a term_synonym table once the transient closures table
> is populated. It also removes one more block of special case code - we
> can look up synonyms and antonyms and identities and isas and hasas with
> the same code without extra tables. My rule of thumb is that any info
> that relates terms to one another should be in the ontology itself, and
> never in an extra table.
>
> Matthew
>
> Hilmar Lapp wrote:
> > We need one more table for a full representation of ontology terms to
> > record their synonyms. The table can be quite minimalist:
> >
> >     CREATE TABLE term_synonym (
> >         synonym       VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
> >         term_id          INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
> >         --
> >         FOREIGN KEY (term_id) REFERENCES term (term_id),
> >         UNIQUE (term_id,synonym);
> >     );
> >
> > Has anyone any objections to this or better ideas how to capture
> > synonyms of terms?
> >
> >     -hilmar
>
>
>

-- 
 Aaron J Mackey
 Pearson Laboratory
 University of Virginia
 (434) 924-2821
 amackey at virginia.edu