The Reasoner and the Interface

When the reasoner is running, it changes the way the ontology is displayed in the ontology editor panel. Some of the implied links discovered by the reasoner may be shown in the ontology editor panel. By default, these implied links are displayed with a wavy blue arrow:

Trimming

Not all implied links are shown in the ontology editor panel, because doing so would quickly make the interface unmanagable. Consider our elephant ontology once more:

If every single implied link were shown, we would see:

It's easy to imagine how confusing this would get with an ontology of any complexity.

To reduce this complexity, OBO-Edit trims the ontology before displaying it. Trimming hides links that would unhelpfully clutter the display. The reasoner still knows about these links, but they are not shown to the user.

A link L is trimmed if it satisfies either of the following conditions:

There is one exception: user-created links are never trimmed. This means that redundant links are always visible, because all redundant links are user-created.