Currently KGCL has a simple data model where each type represents a change or set or changes. A change object can be thought of as a proposition, and can have metadata added to this.

In some cases, ontologies may want to represent the proposition directly in the ontology without fully enacting the change. This is most prominent in the case of obsoletion, where we may want metadata about a proposed ontology to live in the ontology for a period such as a month or two months, where it is queryable. However, we can imagine this for any change type.

An additional challenge here is that the mechanism for representing propositions in an ontology is not as standardized as for example obsoletion (which is itself not as standardized as it could be). E.g in mondo things may go into a mondo-specific "obsoletion_subset".

Some options here:

One is to discourage the notion of storing propositions in the ontology. If you want to query for propositions (such as proposed obsoletions), then query the GitHub issue and PR repository. There is a clear separation of concerns here: the ontology represents the current state of things, and we use infrastructure intended for propositions to store propositions. However, this is not not an ideal solution, e.g. do we expect all ontology browsers to implement some complex ingest mechanism?

Another is to create a collection of shadow classes, e.g. ProposedObsoletion, ProposedNodeMove, ... This is fairly awkward though.

Another option is to add a flag to all classes such as "partial: bool". The actual changes applied to an apply agent would vary depending on the setting of this flag. We can even imagine having maturity levels etc.

The simplest option might be that if something is a proposition we simply insert the change object as KGCL triples into the ontology. The ontology simply stores its own change. This may encounter resistance as people might like continuing to use familiar mechanisms such as oio:subset, IAO IDs etc.

What will probably sit best with existing ontologies is if there is a way to customize how an apply command works on an ontology specific basis, perhaps making "partial" a parameter on the application function