I think it’s important that changes are tracked, in such a way that any user who wishes can see how a particular record changed over time: who changed it, when, and why. There may be some information, particularly information relating to deposited sequences, including the sequence itself, which should never be changed. The approach of downloading and uploading entire gene sets will make it difficult to track and supervise changes. For example a curator might make several changes in the spreadsheet for different reasons. How do they record the correct reason for each change? How do they ensure that no unintended changes were made by accident?
The approach seems to enforce a single representation of the germline set for a species. As far as I can see it wouldn’t support, for example, the publication by different groups of a human germline with differing naming schemes, or numbering schemes, or to have different selections of ‘high confidence’ sequences - an upload from one curator would be all too likely to overwrite changes made by another. Is this what we want? By the way, the same issue would make it difficult for multiple curators to work on the same scheme. Unless we built a mechanism for merging changes, they would need to agree which of them ‘had the baton’ at any particular time.
William