Re: [Urgent] Proposed changes to Bioschemas

Hi Alasdair, all,

First - I'm totally supportive of the drive to propose a limited number 
of entities, I think this is a great idea, it seems highly pragmatic and 
well aligned with the original vision of the Bioschemas project.

But I do have some concerns about the process used to decide which new 
types should be put forward. What was the rationale for choosing this 
particular set of entities? Everyone involved in the Bioschemas efforts 
have spent quite a long period of time collecting detailed usecase and 
building or designing implementations that deliver on them. This 
proposal seems to have bypassed some of that work and with a very short 
time frame for comment. How did you evaluate this set of entities 
against the existing usecases and current implementations?

Speaking for the samples group, I don't think everyone involved has had 
time to evaluate the impact of this proposal on the samples driving 
usecases, including the MarRef deployment and Biobanks exchange work. At 
first reading I think this will make it harder to demonstrate utility 
for these deployments. If the samples usecases were deprioritized in 
favour of other more compelling examples, that's reasonable, but the 
proposal document doesn't indicate how this was determined and I'd like 
to have a chance to review the results of that decision-making process.

Thanks,

Tony


On 31/10/2018 10:01, Gray, Alasdair J G wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> This is a reminder that you have until the end of tomorrow to comment 
> on the proposed changes to Bioschemas that are presented in the 
> document at the following link.
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cw9K25N1l-Lbet1cahJuFtYgNKiF76apGcCqJPSeuZg/edit?usp=sharing
>
> Best regards
>
> Alasdair
>
>> On 26 Oct 2018, at 15:51, Gray, Alasdair J G <A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk 
>> <mailto:A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk>> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks to those who have already reviewed and commented on the document.
>>
>> I have added an addendum to the document which includes the proposal 
>> for the DataRecord type. Sorry for the omission of this in the 
>> original version of the document.
>>
>> Best regards
>>
>> Alasdair
>>
>>> On 25 Oct 2018, at 16:27, Gray, Alasdair J G <A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk 
>>> <mailto:A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Bioschemas Community
>>>
>>> It has been a little over a year since we had the last community 
>>> face-to-face, during which time we have achieved a lot, with 44 
>>> resources publishing markup on over 6 million web pages [1]. Just 
>>> over a month ago we also saw the launch of Google's Dataset Search 
>>> [2] through which we should see some of the promised benefit from 
>>> the Bioschemas markup.
>>>
>>> In the last few weeks, there have been several active discussions on 
>>> github issues (210, 215, 217, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223) [3] relating 
>>> to the extension of schema.org <http://schema.org/> types and 
>>> properties for life sciences. Bioschemas is intended as a simple 
>>> markup mechanism that should be easy to implement for providers and 
>>> consume by tools. In practice we have made things hard.
>>>
>>> Based upon our experiences, including those from running several 
>>> tutorials with groups outside of Bioschemas “family”, we have 
>>> identified two main problems with our current community approach of 
>>> using existing life sciences ontology classes.
>>>
>>>  *
>>>
>>>     The first problem is that generic consumers of the markup, e.g.
>>>     search engines such as Google, will not understand the life
>>>     sciences ontology classes; these services only understand types
>>>     and properties in the schema.org <http://schema.org/> vocabulary
>>>     and this will not change. Consequently, under the current
>>>     approach, these generic services will not be able to distinguish
>>>     between a BioChemEntity that is a Protein or a Gene, they will
>>>     just understand them all as BioChemEntity. Thus there will be no
>>>     benefit to the resources (eg. individual databases) in these
>>>     services (Google) consuming the markup.
>>>
>>>  *
>>>     The second is that the choice of classes and terms from specific
>>>     life sciences ontologies are not compatible with the nature of
>>>     the schema.org <http://schema.org/> vocabulary. This leads to
>>>     logical inconsistencies for services that consume the markup.
>>>
>>> To overcome these challenges, we propose that a limited number of 
>>> new types and properties should be added to schema.org 
>>> <http://schema.org/> as hosted extensions. These have been developed 
>>> in discussion with Dan Brickley (chair of the schema.org 
>>> <http://schema.org/> community group) and will serve as bridging 
>>> terms between the generic schema.org <http://schema.org/> vocabulary 
>>> and the more specific life sciences ontologies. We anticipate that 
>>> there will be further types proposed in the future, e.g. chemical.
>>>
>>> The proposal is available in the following google document. Only 
>>> comment permissions have been granted so that the original proposal 
>>> is unchanged.
>>>
>>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cw9K25N1l-Lbet1cahJuFtYgNKiF76apGcCqJPSeuZg/edit?usp=sharing
>>>
>>> In order that these changes can be in place by the biohackathon we 
>>> request any comments on these proposals are made by 1 November.
>>>
>>> Best regards
>>>
>>> Alasdair, Leyla, Sarala, Nick, Carole, and Rafa
>>>
>>> [1] http://bioschemas.org/liveDeploys/
>>>
>>> [2] https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch
>>>
>>> [3] https://github.com/BioSchemas/specifications/issues/
>>> --
>>> Alasdair J G Gray
>>> Associate Professor in Computer Science,
>>> School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
>>> Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK.
>>>
>>> Email: A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk <mailto:A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk>
>>> Web: http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ajg33
>>> ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5711-4872
>>> Office: Earl Mountbatten Building 1.39
>>> Twitter: @gray_alasdair
>>>
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>>
>> --
>> Alasdair J G Gray
>> Associate Professor in Computer Science,
>> School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
>> Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK.
>>
>> Email: A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk <mailto:A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk>
>> Web: http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ajg33
>> ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5711-4872
>> Office: Earl Mountbatten Building 1.39
>> Twitter: @gray_alasdair
>
> --
> Alasdair J G Gray
> Associate Professor in Computer Science,
> School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
> Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK.
>
> Email: A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk <mailto:A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk>
> Web: http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ajg33
> ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5711-4872
> Office: Earl Mountbatten Building 1.39
> Twitter: @gray_alasdair
>

-- 
Tony Burdett
Technical Co-ordinator - Samples, Phenotypes and Ontologies Team,
European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton
Cambridge CB10 1SD
United Kingdom
Tel: + 44 (0) 1223 494 624

Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2018 13:38:27 UTC