[Ontology-editors] Disjoint_from and symmetry

[Jennifer Deegan (nee Clark)]

Hi,

The OBO-Edit working group would like to propose a small change to the 
way that disjoint relationships are handled.

Currently when two terms are disjoint_from one another they each have a 
disjoint_from relationship to the other as follows.

term1
disjoint_from: term 2

term2
disjoint_from: term 1

However, since the disjoint_from relationship is symmetrical, it should 
not really be necessary to have two relationships connecting two 
disjoint terms, and the two terms should be able to share one disjoint 
relationship. This is apparently how the situation is handled in OWL and 
protege.

We would like to propose to start having just one relationship shared 
between each pair of terms, as it is thought that this will greatly 
simplify the handling of the relationships in OBO-Edit.
We would like to hear what people think about this.

In our discussion last night we did not discuss how the OBO stanza will 
look if there is only one relationship. We would need to discuss that 
further, and I would be keen to hear ideas in response to this mail.

Thanks for taking the time to think about this. If we do not hear 
objections by Friday of this week, then we will proceed to the next 
stage of planning.

Thanks,

Jennifer