Public Requirements
URI Requirements
The basic functional requirement is that we provide persistent URIs for all content in BioPortal terminologies and ontologies, and that those URIs will also contain the version info for the terminology so that new terminology releases do not invalidate older URIs (ie, no URI ever disappears).
In terms of implementation, this would be a matter of putting an OWL (or RDF) version of every ontology/terminology in BioPortal into a public bioontology directory (which we already have: http://bioontology.org/projects/ontologies/) The file of each version would contain the version number so that we can have unique URIs for every term in every version.
In the future, we can always add a link between URIs of different versions of the same term (in doing so have a "linked list" representing the history). This is purely additive so this will not affect the first-priority task of making URIs unique and persistent per version as a first step. Also, in future, if LexGrid provides a way of delivering URIs, we can consider that, but I suspect this is not on the horizon for some time, and we need to get a solution for URIs delivered sooner rather than later.