Bio::Ontology::Relationship 1.4

Bio::Ontology::Relationship is a relationship for an ontology.

SYNOPSIS

$rel = Bio::Ontology::Relationship->new( -identifier => "16847",
-subject_term => $subj,
-object_term => $obj,
-predicate_term => $pred );

This is a basic implementation of Bio::Ontology::RelationshipI.

The terminology we use here is the one commonly used for ontologies, namely the triple of (subject, predicate, object), which in addition is scoped in a namespace (ontology). It is called triple because it is a tuple of three ontology terms.

There are other terminologies in use for expressing relationships. For those who it helps to better understand the concept, the triple of (child, relationship type, parent) would be equivalent to the terminology chosen here, disregarding the question whether the notion of parent and child is sensible in the context of the relationship type or not. Especially in the case of ontologies with a wide variety of predicates the parent/child terminology and similar ones can quickly become ambiguous (e.g., A synthesises B), meaningless (e.g., A binds B), or even conflicting (e.g., A is-parent-of B), and are therefore strongly discouraged.