On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, William Bug wrote:
Ditto, Kei!!!
Of course, at the heart of this - in addition to the very important issue
Chemezie introduced re: ACL at the graph node level, if that is practical -
is the discussion we've been having regarding URIs - how to create them,
broadcast/discover them, and guarantee their uniqueness.
The individual tracking issue Kei mentions below is one we've had to deal
with on the BIRN project, where different research groups are passing a given
subject (or samples from that subject) amongst themselves to perform
different sorts of investigation - vital imaging with MRI or fMRI, imaging of
dead tissue - the brain - at high rez either with histo-based LM techniques
or for some samples EM - also gene expression analysis on matched
microdissected tissue punches, ELIZA, etc.
There is also the very difficult issue of being able to stream-line the IRB
paperwork across campuses which to some extent depends on being able to
"publish" subject/sample level IDs.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the specific needs here, but I wonder if
authoritative identification of individuals is really an argument for a
ID-oriented naming convention - such as LSID.
I have a better understanding (than I did before) of what drives the need
for LSID's from the ongoing discussions, but it's worth mentioning that the mechanics of
InverseFunctionalProperties (which FOAF uses) can provide a means to
identify individuals uniquely. If you label a role/property as being
inverse functional then you are saying it can only be used on *one*
individual. Explicitely:
{?P a owl:InverseFunctionalProperty. ?X ?P ?O. ?Y ?P ?O} => {?X owl:sameAs ?Y}.
As long as your vocabulary has such identifying roles/properties (FOAF
uses the persons email address, but it could be any centrally managed
system-wide identifier - I'm certain most institutions have this) you can very easily enable identity reasoning
This is why we'd started investigating LSID over a year ago, as we need an ID
franking authority at least at the subject and or biomaterial sample level.
To be honest, I think we've only partly solved this problem, to the extent
required to pass animals back-n-forth, and so far we've been using a
propriotary authority, which will later need to be mapped to some more global
authentication service, possibly LSID-based, or whatever becomes the "best
practice" as recommended by the BioRDF group.
Cheers,
Bill
Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
