Re: Species Concept Mapping RDF fixes and question, should the species be represented as a class? Class SpeciesConcept => Class Species Cougar

> In any civilized ontology language, a class is an instance. Use OWL 2 from
> now on.
> Pat

Ah, a nice idea, but I doubt it will accomplish what Pete is trying to
do (Or my limited understanding of OWL 2 is wrong---which is a good
hypothesis). http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-owl2-syntax-20091027/#Metamodeling
says that when a  resource is mentioned as both an individual and a
class, the two mentions are interpreted independently.  My
understanding of that is that it will not be possible to put any
semantics on one of them that implies semantics on the other.

I'd be happy to have it explained why that understanding is wrong,
especially by a simple example that the Manchester OWL2 validator
agrees is OWL2 DL (or even better, OWL2 RL)

Bob Morris



On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
>
> On Dec 1, 2009, at 9:14 PM, Peter DeVries wrote:
>
> Hi Bob,
> I came about this after it was suggested to me that a species might be best
> represented as a class.
> It also occurred to me that an ontology that works to describe mosquito
> species would probably be very different than an ontology used to describe
> members of the cat family.
> What I thought was that there are times when you want to treat a species as
> an instance and other time you want to treat it as a class.
>
> In any civilized ontology language, a class is an instance. Use OWL 2 from
> now on.
> Pat
>
> Thinking out loud here.
> The lightweight representations shown in this
> example http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p.rdf
> are used when you just need something simple that gives you the basic
> information and maps concepts.
> However, it really does not document what you mean by the URI. By that I
> mean, it does not provide any information that will allow you to
> determine what species concept you should apply for a given specimen.
> For that you will need something more complex, that can be loaded as needed.
> Something more like this representation.
> http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/owlses/v6n7p/2009-12-01.owl (Initially an
> individual file made with Protege)
>
> How would these be used?
> Lets say that an individual Cougar was observed within the boundaries of the
> state of Wisconsin.
> That individual is an instance, however, from that you should be able to
> reason that the species
> http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p
>
> was observed within the State of Wisconsin.
> This should allow you to then run queries on species observed in a
> particular geographic location as shown in these examples.
> http://about.geospecies.org/sparql.xhtml
>
> You should also be able to make other assertions at the species concept
> level based on data from collections of individuals.
> For example, the mosquito Culex territans femalesfeedPrimarily on Anurans
> (frogs and toads)
> How do I determine if the cat I have captured is Puma concolor vs Puma
> yagouaroundi? (or another less obvious example)
> See
> http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p and  http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/Hq5OE
> and from there get the related owl documents. The owl documents should
> provide some information that will allow you to determine
> which concept is the best match for the captured specimen.
> At least that is what I would like to do. :-)
> - Pete
> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Peter DeVries <pete.devries@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Hi LOD'ers,
>> >[...]
>> > I was thinking that the species itself should be a class so that
>> > individuals
>> > of that species would be instances of that class.
>> > Probably another skos:Concept class.
>> > So an individual species concept class like that for the Cougar would be
>> > an
>> > instance of a skos:Concept (SpeciesConcept) class and also be a
>> > skos:Concept
>> > class (Cougar) of it's own.
>> > Individual animals would be instances of the skos:Concept class
>> > (Cougar).
>> >[...]
>>
>> Umm, if every species concept is a class, about how many classes, in
>> your estimate,  would there be in a comprehensive ontology?
>>
>> --Bob
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Robert A. Morris
>> Professor of Computer Science (nominally retired)
>> UMASS-Boston
>> 100 Morrissey Blvd
>> Boston, MA 02125-3390
>> Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
>> email: ram@cs.umb.edu
>> web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
>> web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush
>> http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
>> phone (+1)617 287 6466
>
>
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Pete DeVries
> Department of Entomology
> University of Wisconsin - Madison
> 445 Russell Laboratories
> 1630 Linden Drive
> Madison, WI 53706
> GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
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-- 
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science (nominally retired)
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: ram@cs.umb.edu
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466

Received on Friday, 4 December 2009 17:15:21 UTC