[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