[Go] Composition of the generic GO slim

[Amelia Ireland]

Back in Gotham City, Valerie Wood wrote:

[snip Val's original GO slim]

Val, this slim looks very useful and the principles that you used to make
it are good. Perhaps it might be useful if a multicellular organism person
(or persons) and a prokaryote person had a quick look to see if the slim
would fit their organism, too, using the same criteria? The slim should
also be expanded to cover the component and function ontologies, too.

It would also be useful to have documented the criteria used for
construction of the GO slim, not only to inform users of how the slim was
created, but also to give potential GO slim creators some guidelines for
how to create a maximally useful slim.

[cutting to Val's response to Judy]
>You are correct  that no one slim is going to fit all organisms or all 
>uses. However it isn't simple  to create an informative slim which gives
>complete (or nearly complete) coverage of all of an organisms annotations
>(and complete coverage of the annotation space  is an important feature
>of a robust slim).

I would also add to this that constructing a good slim is a time consuming
process, and for those users who eventually want to create their own
custom slim, a good generic slim would be an invaluable time saver. It
would be far easier to tinker with a complete slim than it would to create
one from scratch. I also think that a lot of users don't necessarily want
to expend time and effort on creating their own slim if they can use a
pre-built one. Val knows the ins and outs of the GO pretty well (to judge
by the number of SF items she's submitted, anyway! ;) ), and so she
probably had a rough idea of what would go in before she started. A new
user would have to learn the GO paradigm and examine the ontologies in
some detail before they could even start constructing their own custom
slim. This might prove too daunting or time-consuming a task, and hence
put people off. I think providing an up-to-date generic slim that people
can use as a starting point for further slimmage is essential.

Cheers,
Amelia.

-- 
Amelia Ireland
GO Editorial Office
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