Package org.biojava.ontology

Interface RemoteTerm

  • All Superinterfaces:
    Annotatable, Changeable, Term
    All Known Implementing Classes:
    RemoteTerm.Impl
    public interface RemoteTerm
extends Term
    A term in another ontology.

    This is how you allow one ontology to refer to terms in another one. Since these ontologies are designed to be modular and self-contained, it is expected that you would not copy terms from one ontology into another. The best-practice way to represent terms from another ontology in your one is to use RemoteTerm instances. Ontology has a method importTerm that does this for you. By default, imported terms will have names composed from the source ontology and the imported term name. However, this should be over-rideable.

    The imported term will have the same name as the original term. They are implicitly identical to each other. The most common use of imports will be to slurp in the "core" ontology so that operations such as is-a and has-a are available.

    Since:
    1.4
    Author:
    Thomas Down, Matthew Pocock