- From: Matthias Samwald <samwald@gmx.at>
- Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 12:27:31 +0200
- To: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk>, <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
> Also, it's not clear what it meant by "same thing". > > > An genbank record and embl record identifying the same piece of DNA > are not the same thing; they are different records. > Or probably "different record, but same gene, according to some criteria" Clearly, there should be different URIs for different records. However, the problem discussed higher up in this thread was that there could be different URIs for EXACTLY the same record, simply because a different namespace is used, for instance. Just a single differing character is sufficient. If we do not try to make an effort to avoid even this simple problem, our ultimate goal (data/information integration) seems unreachable. By the way, I think the notion of having 'records' that we are ascribing URIs to is something that is necessary in the transition period between current database systems and the biomedical Semantic Web, but this is not the best use we can make of the RDF and OWL standards. Ultimately, we should only have to talk about the biological things (and apply URIs to real world resources) and not the digital representations of them (and apply URIs to some database entries that have data about real world resources). The beauty of these standards is that they allow us to 'talk' and reason about the things we care about themselves. The question should be 'what is the URI of the class of human insulin molecules?', not 'what is the URI of the database entry about human insulin molecules in the Uniprot database?'. Down with the unnecessary abstractions! kind regards, Matthias Samwald
Received on Wednesday, 10 May 2006 10:27:38 UTC