Range of <RO:is evidence for> too limited?

[Andre Dekker]

Hi,

I am trying to model that an assay (process) provides evidence for the existence of a disease (realizable entity). 

I think <RO:is evidence for> is the right relation for this. 

However in the definitions it is stated that 

"A relationship between a piece of evidence a and some entity b, where b is an information content entity, material entity or process, and the a supports either the existence of b, or the truth value of b."

Which would mean that a realizable entity such as a disease is not part of the range of this relation. 

Was there a reason to exclude realizable entities from this list?  

Thanks for your help/answer,

Andre

[Darren A Natale]

I don't have an answer to your direct question, but perhaps http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/RO_0002610 "correlated with" or one of its children would work? Either way, I would imagine you'll need another relation (or a change of model) to handle the fact that the assay itself says nothing; rather, it is the result of the assay that provides evidence.

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[Andre Dekker]

Thanks for your input, you are right – it is not the assay itself but its results that provide the evidence.

 

But the question is about the range <is evidence for>, is there a reason this cannot be a realizable entity?

 

What I would like to assert is something like <andre’s results_of_an_assay> <is evidence for> <andre’s prostate cancer> where < andre’s prostate cancer > <type> <realizable entity>

 

(Correlated is not the right relationship I feel, as that is meant for statistical relationships where we are looking for a deterministic relationship).

 

From: Darren A Natale <da...@georgetown.edu>
Sent: Monday, March 2, 2026 15:32
To: obo-re...@googlegroups.com; Andre Dekker <adek...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Range of <RO:is evidence for> too limited?

 

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[Chris Mungall]

I recommend making an issue to generalize this

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[bpe...@lji.org]

We discussed this briefly on the OBI call 3/2/2026. We agree with Chris that it is important to generalize this beyond ‘disease’. There has been a long history of discussions between the ECO and OBI teams on how to link data to conclusions, which applies here, and which would be great to deal with comprehensively. We certainly think this needs to be applicable to diseases and other characteristics as well. We would suggest that this could be discussed in a future COB call, as it goes beyond just RO. [Bjoern, Sebastian, James, Dan, Jennifer]