Hello,
There were still some questions about BioGateway
(http://www.semantic-systems-biology.org/) that emerged during the F2F
meeting, but couldn't be discussed fully as the schedule was very tight.
The key question was whether BioGateway is compatible with the HCLS
initiatives, and BioRDF in particular. That is not so clear, mainly
because of the URIs.
Which RDF did we use?
We made our own RDF-translations trough Onto-Perl
(http://search.cpan.org/~easr/ONTO-PERL-1.13/), an in-house programming
library, to have optimal queryability and integration of all the
imported resources. Everything is fully automatic from downloading the
original sources, to loading the created RDF into Virtuoso.
Why didn't we use existing OWL files, to use its RDF syntax?
We found out that SPARQL gave us the best results for querying. As
Onto-Perl allows RDF-exports, we could optimize the RDF to get less
verbose queries and quicker answers. The RDF syntax of OWL contains a
sort of mini-graphs between related classes. That makes it a heavy
burden for SPARQL querying, although SPARQL can not exploit this for
reasoning purposes.
About the URIs:
We created our own URIs, because it was not clear to us which URIs
should be preferred for usage. And also because that made it easy during
the development, and realized too late how important this is. We think
that common URIs is very important to make the Semantic Web work. Just
like common tools and formats, we need common URIs! This is not crucial
for http-URIs for web browsing by human, because a redirect to a
synonymous URI will cost only a small fraction of the time, and web
developers can maintain the redirects manually. But this is completely
different for query systems and reasoning systems that have to do
complex operations on millions of such URIs in a very short time.
Large synonym lists might solve this problem technically, but should be
avoided if possible, I think.
regards,
Ward
Matthias Samwald wrote:
Are the minutes from our F2F meeting [1] last week in Mandelieu
already online? I can only find some fragments, but not all of them.
Thanks,
Matthias Samwald
[1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG/F2F/2008-10_F2F
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Ward Blondé [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PhD student
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