Reference
Suggesting a change
How to suggest a change to the vocabulary, to your study rules or to the platform, and what makes a suggestion easy to act on.
Three kinds of change
Most suggestions are one of three kinds, and each goes to a different place.
- Vocabulary: a missing protein synonym, a property synonym or a definition. Do this in ontology review inside your project.
- Study rules: criteria, thresholds, target units and fields that need a person. These are in the study configuration and belong to the project owner.
- Platform: anything that works the same way for everybody, such as how PDFs are read, unit conversions, quality checks, the export fields and these help pages.
What a good platform suggestion includes
A change to the platform affects every dataset built afterwards, so describe it precisely.
- What happens today, and why it is wrong.
- A concrete case: a real paper, a real value, and what the platform did with it.
- What should happen instead, including in unclear cases.
- What the change would mean for data that already exists.
Two principles a suggestion should respect
One list for each thing. Export headings, roles, quality checks and units are each defined once, and everything else follows from that list, so a suggestion should change the list and not add a second copy.
Declining is better than guessing. Where the platform cannot do something safely, it flags the value and stops. A suggestion that replaces a refusal with an assumption needs to explain why the assumption is safe.
Where to send it
Send a platform suggestion to a platform owner, with the details above. Suggestions about these help pages are welcome in the same way: say which page, what is unclear or wrong, and what it should say.