I'm sorry Davide, but your description seems to put this stuff at an unambiguous level, but we all know that's not true. The practitioners may use a good fact base (in the uk it's a booklet called mims) but when the scalpel hits, it's a judgement call. Wrapping such human things into software isn't going to get us anywhere without careful thought. I suppose what I'm saying is we have to allow for ignorance in these systems, which is virtually impossible to express, even in OWL.
On 2 February 2010 02:54, Davide Zaccagnini <dav...@landcglobal.com> wrote: > In a clinical IT system actionable data (diagnoses, allergies, medications > etc) are typically quite unambiguous at the application level. Similarly, > information in documents is almost always clear to a physician who reads it. > This is to say that for most clinical documents the ontology that can be > imposed to formalize meaning (SNOMED for instance) is typically stable and > well agreed upon. And so are the possible mappings from one ontology to > another, among those commonly used in healthcare. The story gets way more > complicated for data to be used in research, but the good news is that most > medical terminologies can be applied to a document with good chances that the > resulting graph will be understood, accepted and used by applications and > users. At least for the most commonly used clinical data. > inb > Davide > > -----Original Message----- > From: public-semweb-lifesci-requ...@w3.org > [mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-requ...@w3.org] On Behalf Of Peter Ansell > Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 6:41 PM > To: Andrea Splendiani > Cc: John Madden; w3c semweb HCLS; Eric Prud'hommeaux > Subject: Re: When does a document acquire (web) semantics? > > I agree completely! > > Cheers, > > Peter > > On 2 February 2010 09:26, Andrea Splendiani > <andrea.splendi...@bbsrc.ac.uk> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I think there are two aspects related to semantics. >> One is interpretation (like: the world is flat by Mark). And this is in the >> ontology or, if you want, even in queries. >> But there is also the fact that you "name" things when you expose a >> resource. The resource itself, or some info in more detail. >> This naming is based on some common grounding without which you cannot apply >> ontologies or queries. >> >> my 0.1 cents >> >> ciao, >> Andrea >> >> On 1 Feb 2010, at 18:30, John Madden wrote: >> >>> We had an interesting call in TERM today. One of the topics I would like to >>> boil down to the question "When does a document acquire its semantics?" or, >>> "when does a document come to mean something?" >>> >>> I argued the (admittedly intentionally) radical view that documents have no >>> semantics whatsoever until a reader performs an act of interpretation upon >>> the document, which in the Semantic Web world would be the same as >>> attributing an RDF/OWL graph to the document. >>> >>> Even if the author of the document attributes a a particular RDF/OWL graph >>> to her won document, I argued that this graph is not privileged in any way. >>> That others could justifiably argue that the author's own RDF/OWL graph is >>> incomplete, or flawed, or irrelevant, or even incorrect. And the same is >>> true of any subsequent interpreters (i.e. authors of RDF/OWL graphs that >>> purport to represent the "meaning" of the same document). >>> >>> Eric argued a really interesting point. He argued (and Eric, correct me if >>> I'm interpreting you wrong here), that semantics instead come into >>> existence (or perhaps *can* come into existence) at the point when somebody >>> executes a SPARQL query on a set of RDF/OWL graphs. That is to say, maybe >>> I'm wrong and semantics doesn't even come into existence when somebody >>> attributes an RDF/XML graph to a document; but rather it only comes into >>> existence when somebody queries across (possibly) many graphs of many >>> different people. >>> >>> What do you think? >>> >>> John >> >> --- >> Andrea Splendiani >> Senior Bioinformatics Scientist >> Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, UK >> andrea.splendi...@bbsrc.ac.uk >> +44(0)1582 763133 ext 2004 >> >> >> > > -- http://danny.ayers.name
