[MOBY-dev] Request to curate the text* branch of the Object ontology

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi all, 

If anyone has noticed, the text* branches of the Object ontology are a
total mess!

We have:

text-plain
text_plain
text_formatted ISA text_plain
text-formatted ISA text-plain
text-html
text-xml
text-base64


I would like to do some manual curation of the ontology to clean this up
a bit.  What I propose is:

text-plain
	text-formatted
		text-html
		text-xml
			text-xhtml
	text-base64

We'll need to leave text_plain and its child objects in the ontology for
the moment since they are being used, but I'll try to get in touch with
the service providers and ask if they would be willing to migrate their
services to use the text-plain tree instead.

Since these objects are all derived from each other through ISA links
alone, it should be safe to do this manipulation (i.e. it will not re-
define the structure of any object, so nobody's service will break).  It
will simply make it more sensible for people to register services that
operate on text.  At the moment, services that parse text must be
registered as consuming Object in order to catch all of the different
types of text!  Ugh...

Are there any objections to me doing this?

M



-- 

--
Mark Wilkinson
Asst. Professor, Dept. of Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI in Bioinformatics, iCAPTURE Centre
St. Paul's Hospital, Rm. 166, 1081 Burrard St.
Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6
tel: 604 682 2344 x62129
fax: 604 806 9274

"For most of this century we have viewed communications as a conduit, 
       a pipe between physical locations on the planet. 
What's happened now is that the conduit has become so big and interesting 
      that communication has become more than a conduit, 
       it has become a destination in its own right..."

                Paul Saffo - Director, Institute for the Future