FlyBase welcomes corrections, scientist use cases, documentation improvements, and reproducible examples.
- Search existing issues for the same biological concept or source field.
- Use official FlyBase identifiers, ontology identifiers, and source vocabulary.
- Cite the public FlyBase file, report field, ontology, or publication that supports the proposal.
- Explain whether a proposal changes biological identity, an evidence-bearing assertion, provenance, release metadata, or display/navigation metadata.
- Never submit credentials, private hosts, Chat logs, account data, unpublished curator notes, or restricted third-party data.
A schema proposal should include:
- the affected entity, assertion, relationship, or property;
- the exact source field and release;
- domain, range, direction, cardinality, and null behavior;
- evidence, qualifier, and provenance behavior;
- licensing/redistribution status; and
- at least one source-backed example and one relevant negative boundary.
Do not introduce replacement identifiers, hardcoded biological answer lists, or generated links as evidence. Approximate interoperability mappings must be identified as broader, narrower, partial, or unmapped rather than described as exact.
- Keep changes focused and explain their scientific effect in plain language.
- Run the repository validation and secret-scanning checks.
- Do not commit generated full-release artifacts, database dumps, or large downloads.
- Schema changes require regenerated documentation and a compatibility note.
Biological corrections may require verification against the current FlyBase release before merge.