#318 Groups: don't make people combine annotations

[Lucian Smith]

In the first RC of Groups, we claim that annotations can be combined. On reflection, this is a lot more difficult than I imagined at first, and should be scrapped: make Annotations exactly the same as Notes.

[Brett Olivier]

Agreed.

[Dagmar Waltemath]

Hi,

how do other package proposals handle this? Combination of annotations is probably a general issue for all?

I agree that it seems best to not make people combine annotations for now. This topic is a general SBML discussion point (and should probably be discussed/explained in the SBML Core specification).
I assume it will involve manual curation, at least for the case of conflicting annotations...

(I remember that we tried to discuss possible solutions in the (stalled) Annotation package proposal, no result.)

[Lucian Smith]

This is now in SVN, and will be incorporated into the next release of Groups.

[Brett Olivier]

Hi Dagmar

You raise a good point, but I assume you are talking about RDF annotations (indeed a pity about the Annotation package).

With respect to Groups, they have to deal with the more general SBML Annotation element which may contain any, arbitrary (within certain rules), XML Annotation of which SBML RDF is one type.

In this context I feel there is no way Groups can deal with the general case of merging Annotations.

The more general question of RDF (or whatever) annotations is definitely worth pursuing in a core context.

[Dagmar Waltemath]

Hej,

thanks for the clarification, you are right that I didn't distinguish the different ways of putting annotations.

And yes, I agree, we should not cover merges of annotations anywhere (neither in groups nor elsewhere, given the current definition of annotations).