Include synonyms

[jakebeal]

In many cases, it would be nice to be able to refer to a term by its synonym rather than just by it's canonical name.

Consider, for example, https://www.ebi.ac.uk/sbo/main/SBO:0000251
Currently, we have tyto.SBO.deoxyribonucleic_acid, but not tyto.SBO.DNA
Likewise, tyto.SBO.get_uri_by_term('deoxyribonucleic acid') works but tyto.SBO.get_uri_by_term('DNA') raises an exception.

[bbartley]

A problem with this particular example is that the synonym, DNA is stored in a free text comment field whose value is Synonym: DNA. So SBO doesn't conform to the best practices for supporting alternative labels in ontologies, e.g., skos:altLabel

[jakebeal]

Ugh, that's horrible. It looks like they made up their own conventions here. Want to file a ticket against SBO to ask them to add the proper practices?

[jakebeal]

Plan: post the issue, then move this to future tasks.