Re: [HCLS] Bridging Ontology...An Automated Approach?

[William Bug]

Yes - but only for NeuronDB and CocoDat. That is - unless the inherent lexicons used by these two resources begin to evolve into something closer to a community-wide, shared ontology for the domains they cover - which may very well be in the offing. There is nothing about this particularly mapping that would make it so, however. There are a very large number of additional neuroscientific data repositories, tool sets, and services in existence now.  Check out the following for a snapshot of the current state of affairs: The Neuroscience Information Framework Catalog (http://neurogateway.org/catalog/browse.do?catEnt=urn:bml/brainml.org:internal/Protocols/3,nsci_resource_informal&catField=full_name) The Neuroscience Database Gateway (http://big.sfn.org/NDG/site/) The Internet Analysis Tools Registry (http://www.cma.mgh.harvard.edu/iatr/display.php?spec=all) - many are tools used in neuroimaging-based research The Neuroinformatics Portal Pilot (http://www.neuroinf.de/) These will all continue to evolve and new ones will be added. I would stand by my last email and re-iterate - I strongly agree with the BOTH the ideas brought up by Chemizie & Matthias, as well as those you mentioned Vipul in response to Don - statistical and network analysis of semantically formal categorizations - the latter as means to improve the efficacy and accuracy of the underlying ontological network to encapsulate our accumulating knowledge base.  The shared formal representation (such as RDF, OWL, etc.), as well as shared formal definitions of entities will need to work hand-in-hand. I still see this as commensurate with the what I've seen referred to on this list as Jim Hendler's principle of "A little SemWebTech goes a long way." (pardon the paraphrase - please correct any misinterpretation). Of course it's a given, having a robust and ubiquitous URI implementation is also a critical factor here, but I won't go down that road here... ;-) Cheers, Bill On Aug 22, 2006, at 7:42 AM, Kashyap, Vipul wrote: Creating explicit connections between all similar and/or identical entries in two schemas is an arduous task that is impractical to do manually. [VK] Will mapping each of these schemas to an ontology and then using the ontology to mediate further queries help alleviate the problem? ---Vipul Bill Bug Senior Research Analyst/Ontological Engineer Laboratory for Bioimaging  & Anatomical Informatics www.neuroterrain.org Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy Drexel University College of Medicine 2900 Queen Lane Philadelphia, PA    19129 215 991 8430 (ph) 610 457 0443 (mobile) 215 843 9367 (fax) Please Note: I now have a new email - [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email and any accompanying attachments are confidential. This information is intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any review, disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of this email communication by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient please notify us immediately by returning this message to the sender and delete all copies. Thank you for your cooperation.