On May 11, 2006, at 4:18 PM, Matthias Samwald wrote:
Hmm, the 10^16 genes instantiated in the volume of space occupied
by me are neither irrelevant (to me anyway), nor are they concepts.
They are very real instances of physical material objects - at
least under one definition of gene.
in your example I presume the ID gene/123 was intended to be an ID
for a gene type rather than an instance - or perhaps not?
It could also be a URI for an OWL class. The 10^16 genes (in the
'physical object' sense) in your body would be instances of this
class - we would probably never make this instances, though. Using
classes would be the most consistent way to do it.
exactly
However, I am not an advocate of doing everything with OWL classes,
as it is hard to implement - actually I am very opposed to that
idea. I am preferring a two-world approach: unifying realist
descriptions of spatiotemporal particulars (e.g. one of your genes)
with conceptualist descriptions (e.g. the concept of 'human insulin
receptor gene'). In this model, the conceptual description are used
to annotate the realist descriptions. However, I will write more
about that some other time, as this is not the topic of this
discussion.
I agree that OWL classes would present many implementation
difficulties here. I'm interested in what the alternatives are, given
that I think we both want to avoid unnecessary abstractions such as
"instance of a database record". I'm wondering how your concept of a
conceptual description differs from owl classes or from my types.
Either way, aiming to describe mere concepts (and not the 'real
things' themselves) is still much better than simply describing
database entries and their relations to one another. If we just
want to have better interoperability between database entries,
generic XML with XLink would suffice - there would be no
significant need for RDF or OWL, in my opinion.
I pretty much agree, with the caveat that I would include types as
being real, and I'm more interested in types than concepts - but
that's another discussion entirely
cheers
chris
//Matthias
