Representing annotations on synonyms

[henrietteharmse]

In discussions with our EOSCLife partners, a requirement that came to our attention is the need to add, for example, citation information for synonyms.

This is information that can easily be added to an ontology as seen here in Protege:

The issue is that currently this is not something that is dealt with in OLS:

In this discussion we want to get feedback from the community in helping guide a possible implementation of this feature.
You can help us by answering the following questions:

1. Is this feature important to you?
2. If your answer to 1 is "yes", then please briefly describe your use case.
3. If you have ideas as to how this feature should work in OLS, please give us your input.

If you have any other thoughts or suggestions on this issue, you are most welcome to note it here as well.

[matentzn]

I think this feature would be very important. Not only for IAO:0000119, but we use this for:

• synonym types (abbreviation, layperson, acronym)
• source (where did this synonym come from/is it used)

Other than somehow showing metadata of synonyms, I don't have a strong opinion right now, but we can talk more about it! Synonyms are a big concern for many members of the community :)

[henrietteharmse]

Yip! IAO:0000119 is merely an example.

[shawntanzk]

oh that feature would be amazing actually.
Big use case would be to see what type of synonym it is - I think there is implications on related vs exact etc.

implementation wise I can imagine a hover over that shows annotations attached to synonyms, and when clicked, it stays there. Links can be clickable then (eg if I annotate the synonym with a PMID:, I should be able to click and it brings me to the paper)
Something like:

Alternative, maybe colour coding different types of synonyms might be a way to make it clearer? Though figuring out how to make colour coding obvious to people might be tricky?

[Drosophilic]

That's a great idea!

[henrietteharmse]

In keynote by Chris Mungall he mentioned the need to tag synonyms for different communities. Different communities can have different opinions on how a term should be named. This could be dealt with by tagging synonyms to indicate that they are preferred by a particular community. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H4oPnrQmro&t=3175s.