Re: RE: BioRDF Brainstorming

> On a broader brainstorming note, it would be nice to have a way of
> specifying that  a certain dc:Agent thinks that one is a better
> annotation than the other also, with the user deciding to trust
> certain Agents to give them useful knowledge, or inversely, to not
> trust specific Agents who they find do not annotate things well.

I am not sure if we will see fine-grained trust metrics in the immediate 
future. Rather, I would expect that 'trustworthiness' and 'annotation 
source' will be conflated, similar to how we currently judge the 
trustworthiness of a web page according to the domain it is residing on 
(nature.com > wikipedia.org > scientology.org), or how we judge an article 
based on the journal it has been published in (Nature Neuroscience > some 
sub-standard journal).

Each article will be annotated in multiple locations with different 
trustworthiness and accuracy. If Elsevier would decide to allow users to 
submit structured digital abstracts, then those annotations created by 
authors and residing on the website of the journals would probably be very 
trustworthy. If Nature Connotea decides to let users tag scientific articles 
in the same form, then the trustworthiness of these annotations created by 
readers would be a bit lower. If a NLP group at the European Bioinformatics 
Institute or at Science Commons makes textmining results available, the 
trustworthiness would also be lower (because NLP techniques have a lower 
accuracy).
The number of trustworthy annotation sources will probably be relatively 
managable in the near future, and we may find that we do not actually need 
to represent trust metrics in a more fine-grained way (e.g. based on RDF 
representations of 'annotation agents'). This has the huge advantage that we 
do not need to worry about authentication mechanisms for such 'annotation 
agents'.

Cheers,
Matthias Samwald

Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2008 21:35:21 UTC