16 Why add information?

As mentioned before, the Ten simple rules for creating reusable pathway models for computational analysis and visualization (Hanspers et al., 2021) paper provides guidelines for creating pathway models. Rules 5 and 6 in particular highlight the importance of adding information to pathway models.

  • Rule 5: Provide literature references, provenance, and evidence for pathway content
  • Rule 6: Annotate pathway models with a title, a description, and ontology terms

In general machine readable information about the pathway or its pathway elements can…

  • Improve the findability and organization of the pathway models.
  • Improve the readability and reusability of the pathway.
  • Be used to automatically filter pathway content by the presence and type of supporting evidence.
  • Support linking pathway model content to other databases and retrieval of additional information

16.1 Pathway information

To the pathway, we can add:

16.2 Pathway element information

To Pathway Elements we can add: