How to do things with SO

How to suggest a new term for the ontology:

  • Look for existing terms, remembering to check synonyms. OBO-Edit has a very nice search engine.
  • If you do not find a match, go to the Sequence Ontology term tracker and browse the existing requests incase it has already been suggested. If so, add your comments to support it.
  • If not, create a new request. The request should contain the name of the term, a definition, and if possible a reference to support it. Also if possible, suggest the parent of the term and any synonyms.
  • Make the title of the term request informative to allow easy browsing of the request items.
When you submit the request, it is sent to the SO developers. We may ask you for more information about the term, and sometimes will send it out to the developers mailing list to solicit comment from the community. We aim to have the request finalized and incorporated in SO within a week or two.

We encourage contributors to use the term tracker rather than email the SO developers list directly with term requests. The term tracker enables us to capture statistics on how many requests we get and how quickly we deal with them.