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OBO Slack https://join.slack.com/t/obo-communitygroup/shared_invite/zt-kpkvg7x3-kz7DeGoYKiY~VGWKO0voQg

Attendees

1. Melanie Wacker
2. Brian Lowe
3. Mike Conlon

Agenda

1. Work in Progress
   
   1. AEON - https://github.com/tibonto/aeon
   2. LANG – https://github.com/vivo-community/language-ontology
   3. ORG – https://github.com/mconlon17/organization-ontology
   4. ADO - https://github.com/vivo-ontologies/academic-degree-ontology
   5. IDO – https://github.com/mconlon17/identifier-ontology
2. Other items
3. Next meeting: August 2, 2021

Notes

1. Would be good to have comments regarding ORG back by August 3 (next meeting).  No active work in ORG at the moment, awaiting comments.
2. The group discussed location and location representation in scholarship.  Location appears to have a duality – when we say "France" are we referring to the place "France' (and perhaps we we referring the place "Metropolitan France" or were we referring to the government/authority of France?  Our notion of "country" takes in both notions – place and authority.  Our use cases appear to need both notions:
   1. For events, we want to say "this event occurred in this place" We might also want to say "this event sanctioned by this authority"
   2. For organizations, we want to say "this university is in this place"  We might also want to say "this university was decreed by this national authority"
   3. For now, we'd like to address the "place" idea.  Places appear to have hierarchy:  coordinate in city in region in country in continent., where here "country" means the place we typically associate with the name of a country.  Whether the country is legally recognized or has a government is not of interest in the notion of place. So for example, the legal designation of Puerto Rico is not of interest for us in saying "the meeting occurred in Puerto Rico".
   4. ORG has a simple representation of place which uses the ideas above.  It doesn't belong in ORG (out of scope).  Whatever location terms we define should be useful in ORG, AEON, and future ontologies.
3. The group discussed improving the current VIVO ontology in two ways – annotations and removal of unused/out-of-scope terms.
   1. Regarding annotations: 
      1. We should be able to add annotations to the VIVO ontology without affecting the software.  Adding annotations would clarify usage, help those new to the ontology, improve documentation, and identify issues for ontology improvement.
      2. Annotation of logical axioms would help those generating content using the VIVO ontology.  This would also have no effect on the software.
   2. Regarding unused terms:
      1. We can identify low use/no use terms and make them as deprecated.
      2. We can ask sites to run queries to tabulate usage of classes and predicates.  This was done years ago. 
      3. Terms removed from the VIVO ontology could be moved to another ontology that could be added back for people who find they need these terms.
      4. The resulting ontology might be 20% smaller as there are many unused terms in vcard.
      5. Code searches can be done to confirm that the term does not appear anywhere in the code.
   3. The work could be done in the vivo-ontology repository.  The current ontology would be tagged.  The software would then treat the tagged ontology as a dependency.  This would allow ontology work to move forward and for the software developers to use whatever tagged version of the ontology they prefer.