Academic Degree Ontology

This is early work to create an academic degree ontology in accord with the OBO Principles

See Early Thoughts on Representing Academic Degrees in VIVO for background, rationale, and figures. The short version is that VIVO currently represents degrees as named individuals, so that the degree you got and the degree I got are the same individual. This will be changed so that the degree you got and the degree I got are individuals of the same class.

Working with ADO

1. Degrees are added to ado-data.tsv
2. Terms from other ontologies are added via imports
3. "core" terms are added to ado-edit.ttl
4. The makefile combines the terms from other ontologies, the degrees, and the "core" to make ado.ttl which is then validated using robot report

TODO

1. Add more degrees. Each time degree(s) are added, run make to build ado.ttl
2. Abbreviation semantics should be corrected -- the IAO property being used is not correct. We need a simple datatype property to assert that a string is an abbreviation of the class label.
3. Correct the compliance report. It appears to be requiring a definition and an elucidation. This is incorrect.
4. Confirm that inference works as expected. Inference for ADO is simple heirarchical inference -- given a degree we can infer the super classes. So, for example, A bachelor of arts degree is a bachelor degree.
5. Work out deontic semantics. The conferring of a degree is a deontic act with two outputs: a role (degree recipient) and a document (the degree document). The degree recipient role is associated with rights, privileges and obligations.
6. Provide working examples to represent what VIVO can currently represent -- a degree is conferred by an organization to an individual on a date with a type and a topic.
7. Other tests include creation of NamedIndividuals from the classes.
8. Discuss with VIVO Ontology Interest Group
9. Discuss with OBO community
10. Write a MIRO report on ADO