Re: Useful deprecation

On Jan 25, 2008, at 11:06 AM, Jeremy Carroll wrote:

> Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>> One thing related to deprecation that *would* be useful would be  
>> to be able to mark a class or property as being deprecated, and  
>> have the effect be as follows:
>> All axioms involving the class/property are ignored by a reasoner.
>> In ontology development in OBI for instance, and in OBO, in  
>> general, although one deprecates or obsoletes a class, one doesn't  
>> remove the term from the ontology (by policy). In order to do  
>> this, one must manually remove axioms. If one were able to leave  
>> the axioms in place, but make them null and void it would be  
>> easier to both deprecate as well as allow one to easily keep  
>> useful history, in the form of the logical definition, around.
>> -Alan
>
> To me this feels like a feature of an individual system, that would  
> allow you to press one button to effectively erase all deprecated  
> stuff.

The intention was to be able to leave it in place and have consumers  
of OWL know to ignore it, rather than to have to take manual action  
each time the ontology was used. The benefits of leaving it place (as  
opposed to erasing it) are that it isn't unusual to want to go back  
and grab a snippet of an old definition.

I agree that this might reasonably be managed by a tool. The idea was  
put out to see if there were any other nibbles, in case it might turn  
out to be something others have wanted.

> This doesn't seem like an appropriate behaviour to standardize.

That very well may be the case :)

-Alan

>
> Jeremy
>

Received on Friday, 25 January 2008 16:41:56 UTC