Principle: Maintenance (principle 16)

• Overview
• Open (principle 1)
• Common Format (principle 2)
• URI/Identifier Space (principle 3)
• Versioning (principle 4)
• Scope (principle 5)
• Textual Definitions (principle 6)
• Relations (principle 7)
• Documentation (principle 8)
• Documented Plurality of Users (principle 9)
• Commitment To Collaboration (principle 10)
• Locus of Authority (principle 11)
• Naming Conventions (principle 12)
• Notification of Changes (principle 13)
• Guidelines (principle 14)
• Maintenance (principle 16)
• Stability of Term Meaning (principle 19)
• Responsiveness (principle 20)

NOTE

The wording of this principle is still in progress.

Summary

The ontology SHOULD reflect changes in scientific consensus to remain accurate over time, and MUST be responsive to community requests.

Purpose

Recommendations and Requirements

Ideally, the maintainer of an ontology SHOULD actively monitor for any changes in scientific consensus, but–at a minimum–the maintainer MUST respond to requests from the community pointing out such changes in accordance with the Responsiveness principle. Tentatively, we consider scientific consensus to be reached if multiple publications by independent labs over a year come to the same conclusion, and there is no or limited (<10%) dissenting opinions published in the same time frame. In cases when an area remains controversial, and no consensus is reached, then it is up to the ontology maintainer to either leave out the controversial term, or pick a viewpoint for practical considerations, and note the presence of controversy in an editor note.

Implementation

Examples

Counter-Examples

Criteria for Review

The developers of the ontology need to include a statement specifying how they are planning to maintain the ontology. We expect that an ontology will be maintained for at least 3 years from the time of acceptance. This check is automatically validated.