Sorry to be resending.
For some reason, this didn't get to the list the first time around.
Cheers,
Bill
Begin forwarded message:
From: William Bug <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: May 19, 2007 7:11:32 AM EDT
To: Eric Neumann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Chris Mungall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Dan Brickley"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Matt Williams"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "public-semweb-lifesci hcls"
<public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Evidence for backing statements
On May 18, 2007, at 7:40 PM, Eric Neumann wrote:
am I correct to assume that within HCLS, all RDF statements we are
considering are not facts, but assertions, that may in the future
be proven false, but never proven true?
I am very excited to hear this will be a W3C focused activity.
Statistical techniques of all sorts - Bayesian especially - are
critical data reduction and analysis tools driving interpretation
in all areas of biomedical science and clearly there needs to be
some way for representational techniques to interoperate with the
derived probabilistic analyses. My tendency is toward the sort of
link Chris Mungall mentioned earlier, whereby the statistics is
linked indirectly, as opposed to being intrinsic to the represented
assertions.
I agree with your proposal, except for the closing statement.
It's not clear to me under what circumstances the following
assertions given as an OWL "defining" relations would be useful to
consider as something other than fact:
"All viable eukaryotic cells have functional mitochondria located
inside them"
"Presynaptic vesicle fusion in neurons leads to release of small
molecule and neuropeptide neurotransmitters into the extracellular
space."
Establishing facts such as this obviously have more than a
pedagogical purpose. They are an important part of the network of
assertions used to drive inference, and - as facts - they need to
be accorded a different role in the inferencing process than
assertions that cannot be established as "universals".
I'm probably being overly naive in stating this view. If that is
so, I welcome others with greater in depth knowledge of the logical
formalisms and implemented tools to explain why one would not want
to make this distinction between the superset of RDF assertions and
that subset expressing established fact. This is a subset whose
absolute size continues to grow - though its relative size compared
to all assertions is clearly decreasing at a much faster rate given
all the high-throughput experimental techniques introduced in the
last 30 years.
Having said this, I do agree it would be very much mutually
beneficial for members of the HCLS IG to provide use cases for this
uncertainty reasoning group to examine.
Cheers,
Bill
Bill Bug
Senior Research Analyst/Ontological Engineer
Laboratory for Bioimaging & Anatomical Informatics
www.neuroterrain.org
Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy
Drexel University College of Medicine
2900 Queen Lane
Philadelphia, PA 19129
215 991 8430 (ph)
610 457 0443 (mobile)
215 843 9367 (fax)
Please Note: I now have a new email - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bill Bug
Senior Research Analyst/Ontological Engineer
Laboratory for Bioimaging & Anatomical Informatics
www.neuroterrain.org
Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy
Drexel University College of Medicine
2900 Queen Lane
Philadelphia, PA 19129
215 991 8430 (ph)
610 457 0443 (mobile)
215 843 9367 (fax)
Please Note: I now have a new email - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
