It's not easy to create a well formed OBO ontology. In a large ontology, it's easy to make mistakes, from large logical or structural errors to small grammatical mistakes in a comment.
The OBO-Edit verification system helps keep these mistakes under control by performing error checks at several stages of editing. Fatal errors and non-fatal warnings are immediately reported to the user. Many common mistakes can be automatically corrected by the verification system.
The OBO-Edit verification system performs some checks during each of five events:
Note that not all checks are performed during each event. Some checks are only performed during certain events. The events during which each check is performed can be configured in The Verification Plugin, but the default settings will work well for most ontologies.
Some ontology checks can take a long time to run, mostly because each term in the ontology must be checked. To keep text edits quick (and error reports easier to read), when checks are initiated by the Text Edit event, only the currently selected term is checked.
Currently, OBO-Edit can perform the following checks: