Basic Concepts and Vocabulary
This guide uses both technical jargon (of which some is commonly used in the formal ontology field,
and some is fairly specific to OBO-Edit) and vocabulary that is more
intuitive to biologists. Technical terms and their synonyms may be used in a
single sentence.
- Classes/Terms -
Classes (often called terms) are the concepts described by your ontology. See
An Introduction to OBO
Ontologies for a detailed discussion of exactly what classes are. For now,
realize that they're probably the part of your ontology that you really care
about.
- Relations/Relationship types - Relations (often called
relationship types in this guide) describe the relationships between terms.
is_a and part_of are both relations. See An Introduction to OBO
Ontologies
for a more detailed
discussion.
- Links/Relationships - When two terms
have a relationship to one another, that relationship is called a
"relationship" (surprise!). A relationship in OBO-Edit consists of a child
term, a relationship type, and a parent term. Relationships are directional:
the child term has a relationship of the given type to the parent term.
Because a relationship indicates a directional connection between two terms,
they are sometimes called "links" in this document.