Eric Neumann ha scritto:
Alan,
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"
I am not arguing for or against this "short-cut", but it is what it
is, and certainly can be handled adding certain logic rules to dealing
with datarecords and their content.
shortcuts can be fine as long as people are aware of it what exactly the
shortcut stands for. Eric's email from earlier this morning stated that
there is no difference, which is different from agreeing on a shortcut.
that aside, even the extended version contains several shortcuts and
implicit information.
- by the maths foundation of databases,
"datarecord:http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345"; refers to an instance.
- by the remainder of the sentence above mentioning "homo sapiens", this
refers to a type (leaving out discussion about the ontological status of
"species), suggesting thereby that "the protein" is not a particular
protein, but protein at the class/universal level.
- then, to make the natural language sentence a coherent piece,
"datarecord:http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345"; should contain data
at the type-level, which is does - what the user finds out upon manual
inspection.
now, I easily can come up with another natural language rendering and
'implicit transitivity': "the protein referenced by
datarecord:http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345 is expressed only in
Joe Soap", which changes the meaning entirely, in that there is some
particular protein expresses in some individual.
in my computer scientist mode, neither do I want to manually browse to
the URL and read the record nor do NLP on any part-of-speech that
contains "http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345"; to figure this out.
Whatever the identifier system (Scott Marshall has a nice list of
requirements & points in today's emails on the topic), the vagaries of
above-suggested 'implicit transitivity' would need to be spelled out
explicitly so that any other software wanting to use the ID system can
recognise the records for what they (are supposed to) represent.
best regards,
marijke
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).
Eric
On Jul 16, 2007, at 12:45 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
On Jul 15, 2007, at 1:53 PM, Eric Jain wrote:
Yes, but what sorts of statements can be made using
http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345 as the subject? Because it
can mean any of the below, even the protein class itself, how can a
*semantic web* statement be made using it?
http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345 is meant to be used for
anything that isn't tied to a specific representation, hoped that
would be clear?
There are proteins, and there are records about proteins. Records
come in different formats. If I make a statement using this url, is
is about the record? or the protein? How should the agent come to know?
-Alan
Eric Neumann, PhD
Senior Strategist, Teranode Corporation
W3C co-chair Healthcare and Life Sciences Interest Group
MIT Fellow, Science Commons
+1 781 856 9132
