Create guidelines or update principles to cover standards for GitHub ontology repositories

[allenbaron]

In discussion of updates to FOODON PURL redirects, the question of whether existing principles should be updated (or new guidelines written) to include and standardize procedures for GitHub repositories arose.

A specific example was the use of v in release versions of ontologies on GitHub. The PURL redirect system allows for flexibility but the question I ask here is whether there should be specific guidelines.

Originally posted in OBOFoundry/purl.obolibrary.org#1087 (comment)

[allenbaron]

Personally, I favor not straying into guidelines for GitHub repositories but I think additional documentation could be helpful. I think outside those with technical expertise confusion on how to use PURLs and set up GitHub repos is fairly common¹.

Perhaps we could update the pages for principles relevant to GitHub repository set up (at least Principle 4: "Versioning") to include documentation? Maybe there's some documentation from ODK on GitHub repo set up for ontologies that could be linked?

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/FoodOntology/foodon/issues/361#issuecomment-3836355605 ↩

[matentzn]

Thank you @allenbaron. My two cents:

1. What really matters are the principles: https://obofoundry.org/principles/fp-004-versioning.html#implementation (as you yourself point out). This means that the PURLS should have a certain shape (no v) - whether or not the github tags have, thats up to whoever designed the system.
2. Tools like ODK must make some assumptions here to ensure that all everything works as intended / is standardise. So I would say with my engineering, not OBO, head on that people should go with the v convention.

But yes - it is simply a convention!

[nataled]

For sure the principles should not be addressing what happens on github. As Nico mentioned, we have something to say about the PURLs, but nothing to say about what the PURLs redirect to. That being said, along with the Standardization Guidelines that the EWG has been working on (and discussing with Ops), there is another document "Development Guidelines" that we did a bit of work on and can now revisit. That might be a reasonable place to put any github concerns. If you have any text along the lines of what you're looking for, please provide it. My ontology is too large to host on github, so I'm not super aware of the conventions used there.

Just an FYI, currently that dev guidelines doc has sections on (1) keeping edit files and release files separate; (2) tagging your github repository with 'OBO Foundry'; (3) publications metadata; (4) short ontology descriptions; and (5) documenting the ontology license. None of these have been discussed, so, again, this is just to indicate the kinds of things we intended to address there.

[allenbaron]

Is the latest version of that document at https://github.com/OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io/blob/nataled-patch-11/docs/DevelopmentGuidelines.md?

Since we are all in agreeement that this should not be addressed in the OBO principles and the DevelopmentGuidelines.md document exists, at least in working form in the docs/ directory in some branch of this repo, I suggest we close this issue.

[nataled]

The latest version is at https://github.com/OBOFoundry/OBOFoundry.github.io/blob/nataled-patch-11/docs/DevelopmentGuidelines.md. Bear in mind it's quite a bit of a mishmash of things, including items that definitely would NOT stay. I already added a stub for this issue in that doc, so if you want to write anything for it, it should go there.