As EricJ's recent note confirmed, and as I suspected, the problem
goes substantially deeper than the issue of simply punning the record
and the protein class.
The fundamental problem is that the record, having not been designed
as the definition of something, isn't the *unambiguous* definition of
anything.
I think this illustrates that that the principal of distinguishing,
as separate URIs, the name of the record from the name of the thing,
will prove to be a useful principle to adopt as a recommended
practice. If forcing people to separately define them prevents an
ambiguity from being introduced in even a few percent of the cases,
then it will be worth the cost. If past experience is anything to go
on, I'm guessing the fraction of cases where this happens will be
substantially higher.
-Alan
On Jul 16, 2007, at 9:31 AM, Eric Neumann wrote:
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.
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
