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

Chris Mungall wrote:
> We have also switched from talk of defining specific proteins to rules 
> to automatically annotate protein records.

You're right, small digression, hope it's of interest anyway :-)


> I read "broad classes of proteins" as being more inclusive than the 
> class denoted by OPSD_HUMAN in my interpretation, but also including for 
> example all human opsin proteins, all vertebrate opsins, ...

At that level of broadness I guess we're talking about protein families and 
domains, which is above the abstraction level used in UniProt. But for some 
people UniProt is already too broad, so I guess it's a point of view thing.


> To summarise: the hypothesis is that any UniProt entry can be formally 
> defined using OWL-DL in an automated fashion in a way that is reasonably 
> concordant with the intent of UniProt. There may well be 
> counter-examples that disprove this.

One thing that may be worth pointing out here is that when biologists have 
some sequences and want to see if there is any relevant information in 
UniProt, they'll blast them, and look at the best matches (subjective).

The one thing they'll certainly not do is use an inference engine :-)

Received on Tuesday, 17 July 2007 08:44:19 UTC