Ontology Metadata Policy (from OBI)

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Minimal requirement for term annotations in the CTO (metadata)

Mandatory metadata: MUST be provided

• preferred_term: The concise, meaningful, and human-friendly name for a class or property preferred by the ontology developers. (US-English)
• definition: The official CTO definition, explaining the meaning of a class or property. Shall be Aristotelian, formalized and normalized. Can be augmented with informal examples to further clarify the meaning of the term.
• definition_editor: The name of the editor of the definition.
• definition_source: An unambiguous and traceable reference to the source of the definition. Examples: ISBN, URI plus date, MeSH Term, PUBMED ID, DOI.
• curation_status: The curation status of a class or property. The allowed values come from an enumerated list of predefined terms. Examples: raw import, obo definition incomplete, graph position temporary, uncurated, curation approved
• example: A phrase describing how a term should be used. May also include other kinds of examples, such as widely known subclasses or instances of the class.

Optional metadata: SHOULD be provided

• alternative_term: An alternative name for a class or property which means the same thing, i.e. semantically equivalent, as the preferred_term.
• alternative_term_tag: A tag to indicate sets of alternative terms. Examples: toxicogenomics_community, abbreviation.
• alternative_term_source: An unambiguous and traceable reference to the source of the alternative_term. Examples: ISBN, URI plus date, MeSH Term, PUBMED ID, DOI.
• editor_note: An administrative note intended for the editor. It will not be included in the publication version of the ontology, so it should contain nothing necessary for end users to understand the ontology.
• external_class: An annotation property that indicates external classes, including their subtrees, for a given anchor class.