Re: Ambiguous names. was: Re: URL +1, LSID -1

>>>>> "MK" == Marijke Keet <keet@inf.unibz.it> writes:

  MK> Lack of sufficient knowledge about a particular (biological) entity is
  MK> a sideshow, not an argument, to the issue of distinguishing real proteins from
  MK> their records.


I agree. The argument is that it's very hard to describe what you mean by a
"protein". We almost certainly don't mean a protein molecule. We might mean a type of
protein. But then we don't know whether two protein molecule are actually of a given
type. 

My questions are how often do we want to refer to a protein, rather than a record
about a protein? And who is responsible for ascribing a ID to a specific type of
protein. In practice, in bioinformatics, the answer to this is a) we don't and b)
uniprot. 

So, while distinguishing between a uniprot record and a protein seems like a good
idea, I'm not convinced it brings you anything. What are you going to do with your
protein ID? 

Phil 


-- 
Phillip Lord,                           Phone: +44 (0) 191 222 7827
Lecturer in Bioinformatics,             Email: phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk
School of Computing Science,            http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord
Claremont Tower Room 909,               skype: russet_apples
Newcastle University,                   
NE1 7RU

Received on Monday, 16 July 2007 14:19:32 UTC