Add NCI Thesaurus

[jsstevenson]

Howdy! We're interested in potentially making use of this in a few of our projects. If you're receptive to PRs, I have a small handful of other sources that we draw from, in addition to NCIt (and let me know if I'm missing anything here).

[cthoyt]

@jsstevenson absolutely, I would love to accept external contributions! I would also like to write a manuscript about the current state of versioning in biomedical database and ontology world, and how bioversions could be useful for the community, so if you're thinking about this stuff too I'd be keen to learn more and see if you'd want to help write that paper

[cthoyt]

Everything looks good! I suppose this was a quite simple one :) I added a request to extract the date of the current release as well.

Last thing - do you know if there is a specific page corresponding to each version? For example in BioGRID, there's a way to construct a URL for a given version, which is really nice. If that's possible it would be great, but not required because we all know NCIt is very difficult to figure out.

[jsstevenson]

Unfortunately the NCIt FTP archives follow a folder structure that is a little hard to capture in a single f-string -- they place the current year's releases one level up from prior years (which are all housed in subdirectories for each year), eg

2020/20.11e Release/
2020/20.12d Release/
21.08e Release/

I'd definitely be interested in getting in touch -- one of our group's broader projects focuses on knowledgebase integration in the cancer variant interpretation space (https://cancervariants.org/projects/integration/), so we have a vested interest in things like data provenance and reproducibility.

[cthoyt]

I'm going to merge now but if you could send a link to that FTP address I would appreciate it

[jsstevenson]

I'm going to merge now but if you could send a link to that FTP address I would appreciate it

👍

https://evs.nci.nih.gov/ftp1/NCI_Thesaurus/archive/