Hi all,
The UO was created before QUDT existed. As an OBO person, I am naturally
a proponent of the benefits of an OBO-treatment of an ontology. However,
in this particular case it may be better to use a more widely supported
semantic web ontology. The UO does have some useful axiomatization
linking units to qualities in PATO; but this could be transferred to a
bridging ontology that uses QUDT. The UO may also have some specific
terms not in QUDT, but these could be maintained as an extension
ontology.
I noted some ideas here on the PATO tracker some time ago
https://github.com/pato-ontology/pato/issues/101
Alan Ruttenberg linked to a UO proposal in that ticket.
George, is the UO actively maintained? One advantage of OBO ontologies
is that for most the source is in github and the community can come in
and make pull requests, so if there is commitment to UO, and people need
new terms and are willing to do the work, it’s minimal effort to merge
in pull requests. But I feel we may want to consider other strategies
such as replacing the core of UO with QUDT and keeping as an extension
ontology.