On Jun 19, 2006, at 9:49 AM, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
URI http://www.example.com/gene;
You need to dereference the "gene" variable in order to understand
it and do
something meaningful about it.
That's one way. You can also publish a paper that describes it, get a
bunch of people agree to use it the same way, supply formal logical
definitions, or a subset of them in OWL.
But you are not required to go to the network and do a geturl, though
that would be nice, when it is available.
Answer to (1a), Of course, you can have "variables" that are not
intended to
be dereferenced, in Java script, the type "undefined" is similar to
a "404".
(Please note, a 404 does not mean that the URI does not exist, it just
implies that at current time, it cannot be dereferenced.) It is not
wrong to
define an "undefined" variable, it is just not much use of it.
(1b) URI is just the name that refers a location on the WEB, so it
of course
is a name.
It is a names that *sometimes* refers to the web. See my quote from
the RFC.
(1c,d) The issue is not "needed" to be or not, it is all about what
you want
to use it.
This is where we agree.
Another part of the conversation talked in terms of whether the URI
http://www.expasy.org/uniprot/P04637 should, for our
purposes, refer to a database record or to a thing in the
world - Human P53 proteins.
I think this is an application issue rather than an architectual
issue.
Hence, it will be a design issue. For the first example, in its
current
state, it is "fine" because what is returned back is an text document.
Then, whoever made such an assertion considers the two electronic
documents
are semantically equivalent. However, if you intended to make
either URI to
represent the entity of "Cellular tumor antigen p53", it is wrong.
Absolutely. But we usually use the term "application issue" to mean
that it is specific to a single application. In this case we are
working together so we really need to set up infrastructure around
how we define this together. I don't think a pure technical solution
will handle this.
How to use of URI should be defined by W3C not by individual user
group.
Otherwise, you will break one web into a bunch of smaller island.
That will
not be what you wanted it for.
W3C knows nothing about Biology. They are good for defining
standards, but won't help us avoid one person using a gene database
entry identifier to refer to a protein in one place and a swissprot
name to refer to what they mean to be the same protein in another
place. That's what we have to work out.
-Alna
