I think one thing to consider is that a person in the biomedical
domain can be two quite distinct things:
a person with a role in some investigation and so on... (there was
some previous thread about things like this) and a "biological
material"... the fact that we are the ones studying ourselves
confuses things a little bit.
FOAF may be related to the concept of people as part of a biomedical
organization, maybe not all the terms... but even Jabber ID may make
sense.
On the other end, people as subject of study may have completely
different dimensions... think about how to relate a cancer line line
to and individual...
But once you separate these two domains, I think things gets more
clear, no ? Expecially for identification. To identify a patient as
someone whose web-blog is.... makes no sense. It makes for a researcher.
Anyway, then things can be unified and all umbiguity/incompleteness
may be tolerated in this case.
best,
Andrea
Il giorno 16/set/06, alle ore 05:19, Xiaoshu Wang ha scritto:
If there are aspects of FOAF that are of use to biomedical
science (I'm not sure what these are), then these should be
separated out into a minimal ontology. If people want to
reason over databases to determine if genotypes correlate
with foaf:OnlineGamingAccount then they can do so by linking
the appropriate ontologies, but foaf:jabberID must be
strictly separated from ontologies for doing science.
+1
That is my feelings too. I have always thought that one of
ontology design
principles should make each ontology's conceptual domain
"orthogonal" to
each other. Although there is no object criteria to determine the
"domain
orthogonality", it is still more of an art than science.
Nevertheless, it
is something that we should keep in mind when designing ontology,
orthogonal
ontologies improve each ontology's sharing and reuse.
With regard to FOAF, I agree with Chris that it might be better if
FOAF can
separate the Person into a different ontology, somewhere in the
scope of the
vCard. Agent etc., might as well be another minimimal top ontologies.
IMHO, inadequate separation of ontology's domain will have some
serious side
effects in the long run. Aside from wasted bandwidth and
computation to
handle the unnecessary statement, but when more ontologies are
shared, the
chance for incur conflict will increase and makes the sharing ontology
impossible.
Xiaoshu
