Review the need for issues/contributor.owl

[gouttegd]

One of the custom steps in the Uberon pipeline is the merging of the issue/contributor.owl file into the ontology.

That file is supposed to contain “contributor“ annotations that are automatically generated based on GitHub activity: basically, a GitHub user is added as a “contributor“ to a term if that user has been involved in the discussion(s) pertaining to that term (e.g. has posted a comment in the issue where the term was requested).

There are several problems with that step:

(1) The process that generates the issue/contributor.owl file relies on tools that are not available in the ODK (blip-findall, tbl2p) and presumably not even supported anymore. Consequently, that file has not been updated at least since the ODK migration, three years ago.

(2) The file is using the http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/contributor annotation property, which is explicitly banned in the rest of Uberon. The continued use of that property escapes the detection by the illegal-annotation-property-violation.sparql check because the issue/contributor.owl file is not merged at the time the check occurs.

(3) Contributors are identified by the URL of their GitHub profile, which is better than nothing I guess but ORCIDs would be preferable.

I question the overall need for such a step. Trying to mention all the persons who participated in the discussion about a term as contributors of that term is noble, but I am not convinced it is worth the added complexity.

I propose to (A) transfer the existing annotations in issue/contributor.owl to the -edit file (and while doing that, switching them to the http://purl.org/dc/terms/contributor property, and replacing the GitHub profile URLs by ORCIDs whenever possible) and (B) get rid of issue/contributor.owl and all the associated code entirely.

(B) Alternatively, if really mentioning all the persons who participated in a discussion about a term as contributors to that term is deemed important, then the code that generates the issue/contributor.owl needs to be thoroughly modernised so that the file can be updated again.