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Update bridging relations in cross-species bridges #3466

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@gouttegd gouttegd commented Jan 23, 2025

This PR changes the axioms that make up the cross-species bridge ontologies.

Currently, foreign (taxon-specific) terms are bridged to their Uberon counterparts by a single equivalence axiom that looks like this:

FBbt:00000002 EquivalentTo: UBERON:6000002 and ('part of' some NCBITaxon:7227)

or like this (if the term represents an occurrent, such as a developmental stage)

FBdv:00007012 EquivalentTo: UBERON:0000105 and ('occurs in' some NCBITaxon:7227)

However, this has only been intended as a temporary situation. The original intention was for each foreign term to be bridged by a pair of axioms as follows:

FBbt:00000002 EquivalentTo: UBERON:6000002 and ('in taxon' some NCBITaxon:7227)
FBbt:00000002 SubClassOf: 'part of' some NCBITaxon:7227

if the term represents a continuant, or

FBbt:00007012 EquivalentTo: UBERON:0000105 and ('in taxon' some NCBITaxon:7227)
FBbt:00007012 SubClassOf: 'occurs in' some NCBITaxon:7227

if the term represents an occurrent.

The two-axioms form had been left aside in favour of the single-axiom form solely for technical reasons, because the bridging pipeline at the time was too difficult to update to accommodate for such a change. This is no longer true, so this PR now implements the two-axioms form.

The Composite Metazoan pipeline is updated accordingly to “unfold“ over 'in taxon' rather than over 'part of' or 'occurs in'.

closes #3409
closes #3378

Update the SSSOM/T-OWL ruleset producing the bridges so that an exact
cross-species exact match yields the two following axioms:

  <subject> EquivalentTo: <object> and (in_taxon some <taxon>)
  <subject> SubClassOf: part_of some <taxon>

(part_of being replaced by occurs_in if the subject is an occurrent)
instead of

  <subject> EquivalentTo: <object> and (part_of some <taxon>)

The two-axioms form has always been the intention for those bridges (see
discussion in #2428), the one-axiom form that we have used so far was
only because of technical limitations.
Now that the equivalence axioms in cross-species bridges use 'in taxon'
instead of 'part of' or 'occurs in', the unfolding step when building
the composite ontologies need to unfold on that relation as well.
We need 'occurrent part of' as it a parent of FBdv's 'substage of'
(FBdv:00018001); without that relation, there is no link between
'substage of' and 'part of', which means that the property chain

  'part of' o 'in taxon' SubPropertyOf: 'in taxon'

cannot apply to 'substage of' relationships. This is turn means that
some relations between FBdv terms cannot be properly translated into
class expressions when generating Composite Metazoan.
Update the documentation about the bridges and the composite ontologies
to reflect the fact that bridging equivalence axioms now use the 'in
taxon' relation, rather than 'part of'.
@gouttegd gouttegd requested a review from matentzn as a code owner January 23, 2025 18:22
@gouttegd gouttegd self-assigned this Jan 23, 2025
@gouttegd gouttegd added bridge-files Issues related to the generation of bridge files from Uberon to other ontologies. composite tech labels Jan 23, 2025
@gouttegd gouttegd requested a review from cmungall January 23, 2025 18:44
@matentzn
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This needs a @cmungall glance, I am not a good reviewer for this; I can help find someone that is.

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gouttegd commented Jan 24, 2025

@matentzn I did explicitly ask @cmungall for a review; you were automatically asked for one as well only because you are a “code owner” on all .yaml files, and this PR modifies the config/taxa.yaml file. :)

But again, this merely (and finally!) implements what was asked more than two years ago.

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cmungall commented Jan 24, 2025 via email

@gouttegd
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gouttegd commented Jan 24, 2025

Queries that work for UBERON may fail for GO or CL.

Not sure I follow you. The relations updated by this PR would not go into UBERON itself -- they would only go into the bridges (and from there into the collected/composite products).

Or are you referring to queries on Ubergraph (which does use the Uberon-provided bridges)? If so, note that this PR also updates the CL bridges - since they are maintained here in Uberon.

But even assuming we can move forward in unison, I now think there is value
in using different relations for different use cases.

I don’t think it is realistic for Uberon to provide several versions of the bridges or of the collected/composite ontologies, each using slightly different axioms to accommodate for potentially different use cases.

If people have use cases that require different bridging axioms that the ones we provide in the pre-built bridges, they now have the possibility of downloading the Uberon SSSOM mapping set and generate their own bridges.

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