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Uberon

The multi-species anatomy ontology. Uberon splits agent work across eight subagents instead of skills.

Repository: obophenotype/uberon Product: src/ontology/uberon-edit.obo Agent surface: GitHub mention, pull request review, local sessions

What to look at

Path What it is
.claude/agents/ Eight subagents
.github/workflows/ai-agent.yml Runs an agent on a GitHub mention
CLAUDE.md Repository instructions

The subagents are deep-research-specialist, design-pattern-advisor, identifier-validator, metadata-checker, ntr-term-researcher, ontology-reasoner, ontology-term-lookup, and task-coordinator.

What works

A subagent runs in its own context and returns a result. This suits jobs that read a lot and report a little. deep-research-specialist can read twenty papers and hand back three sentences, and the main session never carries the twenty papers.

identifier-validator and metadata-checker are checkers. They run after the edit and look for problems. Splitting the checker from the editor is useful: the checker has no stake in the edit being correct.

ntr-term-researcher handles new term requests, the most common ticket type in an anatomy ontology. Uberon named a subagent after its highest-volume job.

What to copy first

Take identifier-validator and metadata-checker. They are the two subagents that transfer to any OBO ontology with the least change. Mondo already runs both.

Gaps

Uberon has one skill and eight subagents. Mondo has six subagents with four of the same names. Neither repository states whether the shared subagents are kept in sync or were copied once and left to drift. If you copy them, record where you copied them from.

CLAUDE.md and .github/copilot-instructions.md hold the same text. See One source of instructions.