An OBI Ontology Datum Proof Sheet

There are numerous past and current examples of ontology-driven projects that provide auto-generated user interfaces for managing entities and relations, each presenting its own varied and complex data model. Our Datum Proof Sheet application aims to simplify the application development landscape by building community consensus about the way basic categorical, textual and numeric datum fields should be described within the OBOFoundry community of ontologies. The proof sheet shows selected datums (grouped under the context of an OBI “data representational model” item) as form inputs on an HTML page, enabling an application ontology’s contents to be presented to end users (ranging in our case from epidemiologists to software developers) for review without necessarily having a working application to showcase them in. The basic relations and cases necessary for presenting datums in a user interface are mostly satisfied by OBI’s design, but we introduce a few extra elements to bring more clarity to datum specifications, and to provide user interface term labels and definitions that may differ from those that ontologists prefer in the “backend”. Keywords—ontology; user interface; datum; categorical; measurable; scalar variable