[Gofriends] Alert: proposal to remove underscores from root term names

[Midori Harris]

Dear GO and Friends,

A proposal has been made to remove the underscores from the names of the three 
ontology roots in GO:

   name: biological_process	-->	name: biological process
   name: cellular_component	-->	name: cellular component
   name: molecular_function	-->	name: molecular function

The reason for this change is consistency: at present these are the only term 
names that contain underscores instead of spaces.

The namespaces will be unaffected; i.e. they will still contain underscores.

This will affect you if you are using the root name as a surrogate for the 
ontology name (obo namespace) in a space-delimited file, or if you have any 
sfotware that assumes that the root name is exactly the same as the ontology 
name (note that OBO namespaces do not allow spaces, but in many ontologies, 
including GO, spaces are allowed in term names).

If there are no objections raised, we will make this change on Friday, June 19, 
2009.

Thanks,
Midori
on behalf of GO's ontology developers


============================
Midori A. Harris, Ph.D.
GO Editor
EMBL - EBI
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton
Cambridge CB10 1SD UK

Tel: +44 (0) 1223 494667
Fax: +44 (0) 1223 494468
Email: midori at ebi.ac.uk