Reproducibly query Phenoscape

[sckott]

That is, presumably Phenoscape database has changed through time and will continue to. Is there a way to query the database such that a query for X on day Y can be reproduced exactly on day Z? I assume not as this is rather unusual, but thought I'd throw it out there. If that database doesn't change the much, i suppose the reproducibility penalty is decreased

[hlapp]

Great suggestion, @sckott, and has been an unsolved challenge for years. It starts with the issue that none but the most basic ontologies are reproducible. That's because due to reuse of other domain and upper ontologies (in the form of "import" clauses in ontologies). The great majority of community ontologies being reused in this way aren't comprehensively archived (that is, some, but not all versions are retained), archival in common data archives doesn't mesh well with the versionIRI used for importing, and often ontologies are imported un-versioned (so even if they were comprehensively archived, the version actually imported at time $X$ may well be different from the one imported at time $X-\delta t$).

[sckott]

thanks for feedback @hlapp - i hear it's possible to version an entire database (then perhaps a parameter/header in the API could be exposed to toggle database version), but don't know how easy/hard that is - and I haven't explored other approaches