[Ontology-editors] OBO file format idea

[Jennifer Deegan (nee Clark)]

Hi Chris,

Now that we are going to have intersection tags, do you think it might 
be possible to also have tags that differentiate between the parts of 
the text definition so that we can retrofit changes more easily, and 
edit in a more sophisticated way in OBO-Edit? I was thinking something 
like this:

[Term]
id: GO:0030182
name: neuron differentiation
namespace: biological_process
def: "<genus>The process whereby a relatively unspecialized cell 
acquires specialized features of a 
</genus><differentium>neuron</differentium><genus>.</genus><gloss>A 
neuron is a type of cell that...</gloss>" [GOC:mah]
is_a: GO:0030154 ! cell differentiation
relationship: part_of GO:0048699 ! generation of neurons

I think that if we had these tags then there could be new features in 
OBO-Edit that would let us quickly improve swathes of definitions. We 
could still have the option to quickly check each change by eye, but 
without having to type each new def in manually. These features could be 
similar to those that cascade override methods to is_a child classes in 
Eclipse.

Jen