From: Aaron G. <agu...@ti...> - 2006-05-19 17:06:22
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What is the rationale behind the name uniqueness constraint? I can see that it would be advantageous in detecting data entry errors and that it will be confusing for humans if several terms have the same name. However, having to artificially alter a name when one encounters a legitimate homograph doesn't seem like a worthy trade off. Any useful representation of a hierarchical controlled vocabulary for geographic locales will necessarily include 'is_a' relationship between states (Georgia) and nations (United States). My rationale for (ab)using the obo format for this information is that we already support storing obo ontologies in the Chado cv schema. And if it weren't for the dratted name constraint my plan would have worked perfectly... -Aaron Doug howe wrote: > Hmm..this is an interesting example. Surely at the level of towns and > even worse at the level of streets there is going to be huge redundancy > in the names. Without a good idea for how, I'm going to speculate that > there must be some better way to handle name redundancy than to simply > mandate that it can't occur. What if there are 400 occurrences of a > geological feature named "Smith Mountain"? Each would be unique via > it's placement in the graph, but do the term strings really need to be > unique as in "Smith Mountain of Lane County", "Smith Mountain of Broward > County"..etc.? > > But then again....REALLY going out on a limb...aren't things like > "Georgia" the State and "Georgia" the town instances rather than types? > If so...do they belong in an ontology? Ugh..I didn't really just say > that...did I? > > -Doug > > Jane Lomax wrote: > >> Hi Aaron - names within the same namespace need to be unique - sorry, >> that should be clearer in the documentation. So in your example, you'd >> need to make it 'Georgia' and 'Georgia State' or something like that. >> We frequently have to do that in GO. >> >> thanks, >> >> jane >> > > |