That's an excellent paper. However, David (the OP) is not actually in control, nor is he designing his ontology He is attempting to build a persistence/retrieval system for the taxonomy (ontology) that the scientific community has already created to categorize life on our planet (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, etc.). As I understand it, he is starting with the Animal kingdom.
What I think will apply VERY WELL to his design process from that paper is the excellent introduction to some of the core concepts of object oriented (OO) development: the class, the instance, properties, and roles. I recommend it as a read that may help bridge the gap between real-world understanding and object conceptualization and data organization. I don't recall if the paper mentioned another OO concept, the "method", but methods are merely actions a class can take within the framework of an application. In a descriptive data model, methods do not play a major role in describing the class (probably why it wasn't listed as part of an ontology). For example a "document" object may have a "print" method, something the object actually does within the bounds of the application, but the action itself provides little or no descriptive value about the "document" object itself. It usually trivial to take a well formed Object Model (such as you would derive by developing an ontology) and convert it to a relational database. Sure there are exceptions but the parallels between the two are generally very straight-forward. Shawn Green Database Administrator Unimin Corporation - Spruce Pine Dr kamadjeu raoul <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 08/02/2005 10:27:21 PM: > May be you should consider building an ontology with your data base. > This links will provides ideas to explore this avenue: > http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontology-tutorial-noy- > mcguinness-abstract.html > > Raoul > > > David Blomstrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've been gathering data for an animal kingdom > database for quite some time and am now trying to > figure out how to organize and display it. So far, I > have a table that lists every order, suborder, family, > subfamily, genus and species of mammal in a > child-parent relationship, like this: > > NAME | PARENT > Carnivora | Mammalia > Canidae | Carnivora > Canis | Canidae > lupus (the wolf) | Canis > > I also broke that table into separate tables listing > only orders, families, genera, species, etc., which I > can then display via joins. I haven't yet figured out > which methid is going to work best. > > I think I'd like to make a content management system, > possibly modeled after Wikipedia, though I'm also > looking at the Tree of Life website at > http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html > > They use a recursive array technique called Edge > Representation, which is discussed about halfway down > this page: > > http://www.phyloinformatics.org/pdf/7.pdf > > Another possible guide is the Animal Diversity Web - > http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/about/technology/index.html > - which uses something called Mousetrap and TaxonDB. > > This is all new and very confusing to me. Making > things even more confusing, I read that XML can be > used in lieu of databases, and at least one reference > seems to suggest that it's the superior choice. So, > before I get in any deeper, I'd like to ask about the > differences between XML and MySQL. What are the pros > and cons, and which would be better for an animal > kingdom database? Or could I use both at the same > time? > > I'm new to XML, too, but it looks like it might not be > too complex. But it's hard to envision how this all > fits together. > > Thanks. > > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com > > -- > MySQL General Mailing List > For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql > To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com
