Re: Advancing translational research with the Semantic Web

On May 17, 2007, at 1:13 PM, Eric Jain wrote:

> The "protein expression process" class that needs to be introduced  
> here does seem a bit like bending over backwards (I know in other  
> cases such as protein-protein interactions it fits better); also  
> you need to introduce an additional predicate, "has_participant".  
> This would certainly work, however from my point of view the best  
> solution is the solution that uses the fewest custom concepts,  
> because the more concepts you introduce, the smaller the chance  
> that someone else will express (or expect to be able to express)  
> the same information in the same way (or in a way that can be  
> mapped easily), and in consequence data integration is more difficult!

Not if the classes are given logical expressions, as I did in my  
example - in that case a reasoner can infer that they are the  
equivalent, based on their logical definitions. They may land up  
having two names, but that's not really a problem if the reasoning  
happened and the equivalence was taken account of in the queries.

-Alan