> the life science community has for years applied an implicit > transitivity to records of things, so that when many say: > "http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345 is expressed only in > species homo sapien" > they usually imply that "the protein referenced by > datarecord:http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345 is expressed only > in species homo sapien"
This is like arguing that people can easily distinguish homonyms like "bank" (the thing you can sit on) from "bank" (where you store your money), therefore it might be Ok to use the same URL for both. > Consider that it may be impossible to change the non-software part > of the LS community on how they think about records vs. conceptual > entities that exist in the real-world (non-IR). Well, they might talk like database entries and physical objects would be the same, but this is not what they *think*. With the Semantic Web / ontologies we want to capture the semantics and the actual thinking, not the linguistic / textual surface representations. - Matthias Samwald
