Rich Text Descriptions

[JMante1]

Not sure if this should go here or in the best practices section. I am working on grounding terms in text descriptions. To accommodate this we would like to have a rich description field that supports markdown formatting. It would match the original description field (for tools that cannot handle rich text) but provide an alternative formatting with more information.

[cjmyers]

If the idea is to add a new predicate in the sbol namespace for this, then it belongs here. If there is a predicate in another namespace that can be used, then it should be a best practice instead.

[jakebeal]

I don't see the desirability of having an alternate description field. A major part of the point of standards like MarkDown and RST is that the material is interpretable even when interpreted as raw text. Having two copies of a description is begging for the description to become forked.

I could, however, see value in having an optional field indicating the preferred markup interpretation of the description. That would be similar to the format field for Attachment. The only sticking point is that EDAM would need to be extended to include Markdown and similar (which it currently doesn't have).

[JMante1]

I see the point of not having two descriptions. I think something that indicates if it is plain text, markdown, or similar would be a good idea though. If the tag is not present it can be assumed it is plain text. Are there other ontologies we could use in the meantime?

[jakebeal]

I'd suggest requesting a term from EDAM and using a local term as a placeholder.