Re: Datatypes with no (cool) URI

For a comprehensive overview of gender vs sex and other challenges in
representing the reality underlying demographic data see this paper
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-833/paper20.pdf

Describing the  The Ontology of Medically Related Social Entitie (OMRSE)
http://code.google.com/p/omrse/ . The URI for the Female Gender =
http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/OMRSE_00000009 (subclass of Gender Role and
Human Social Role)

Regards
@kerfors

2012/4/3 Andy Turner <A.G.D.Turner@leeds.ac.uk>

> I am a researcher working on some Demographic Social Simulation Models. In
> the simple models, I distinguish people classed male at birth and people
> classed female at birth and gender ambiguity, reassignment (sex change) and
> gender recalssification are not modelled. In more complicated models these
> things might be modelled and if I were modelling that, I would consider
> storing a list of changes and have more classes or somehow quantify
> maleness and femaleness. The point I am making here is that the assignment
> of gender (or sex depending on what word you prefer) could be time
> dependent.
>
> In an attempt to make my data storage and retrieval work better I
> implemented two main data stores for people: those classed female at birth;
> those classed male at birth. In my models, even if current gender were
> re-assigned data for that individual would still be stored in the same data
> store.
>
> I suspect that in ambiguous cases in reality what is done in terms of
> gender classification might be different for different countries.
>
> BTW: gender ambiguity was topical in the mainstream media in the Autumn in
> the UK [1]. It is not as uncommon as you might think...
>
> So, gender is a fuzzy thing. Maybe we all belong to male and female
> classes to a degree and for most of us this distinction is binary. In terms
> of encoding, in my implementations I've used 0 for female and 1 for male as
> I find that easy to remember and computationally it makes sense.
>
> Andy
>
> [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14459843
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Phil Archer [phila@w3.org]
> Sent: 03 April 2012 14:33
> To: public-lod@w3.org
> Subject: Datatypes with no (cool) URI
>
> I'm hoping for a bit of advice and rather than talk in the usual generic
> terms I'll use the actual example I'm working on.
>
> I want to define the best way to record a person's sex (this is related
> to the W3C GLD WG's forthcoming spec on describing a Person [1]). To
> encourage interoperability, we want people to use a controlled
> vocabulary and there are several that cover this topic.
>
> ISO 5218 has:
> 0 = not known;
> 1 = male;
> 2 = female;
> 9 = not applicable.
>
> and Eurostat offers
> F = female
> M = male
> OTH = other
> UNK = unknown
> NAP = not applicable
>
> IMO, the spec should not dictate which one to use (there are others too
> of course). What I *do* want to do though is to encourage publishers to
> state which vocabulary they're using. Sounds like a job for a datatype -
> and for that you need a URI for the vocabulary. Something like:
>
> schema:gender "1"^^<http://iso.org/5218/> .
>
> Except I made that iso.org URI up. The actual URI for it is
>
> http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=36266
> (or rather, that's the page about the spec but that's a side issue for
> now).
>
> That URI is just horrible and certainly not a 'cool URI'. The Eurostat
> one is no better.
>
> Does the datatype URI have to resolve to anything (in theory no, but in
> practice? Would a URN be appropriate?
>
> Given that the identifier for the ISO standard is "ISO/IEC 5218:2004"
> how about urn:iso/iec:5218:2005?
>
> For Eurostat, the internal identifier for the vocabulary is "SCL - Sex"
> (standard code list) so would urn:eurostat:scl:sex be appropriate?
>
> Anyone done anything like this in the real world?
>
> All advice gratefully received.
>
> Thank you
>
> Phil.
>
>
> [1] https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/gld/raw-file/default/people/index.html
>
> --
>
>
> Phil Archer
> W3C eGovernment
> http://www.w3.org/egov/
>
> http://philarcher.org
> @philarcher1
>