> Having worked directly with bench scientists for many years, they > view data and databases as "extensions" to what they are really > interested in.
Uhm, probably this differentiates molecular biology from classic, organismal biology (my background). I would never make such statements. > Your example of "bank" and "bank" are disjoint and non-related; in > the case of gene and gene-data-record A gene and a gene-data-record are also disjoint. They share no greater resemblance than a 'bank' and a 'bank'. That they are often used inside the same sentence does not make them any less disjoint. > The evidence for what I point out is found everywhere: "P12345 is > expressed in some tissues"... according to Alan's points, this > would be a wrong statement. When the Semantic Web should really find widespread adoption, they would be saying something like "C12345 is expressed in some tissues", where C12345 is the identifier of a class of protein molecules (which might be described in P12345.html). Not much would change for the scientists -- it would rather seem that using identifiers to identify the proteins themselves instead of the database records is what they implicitly want. cheers, Matthias
