Re: ANNOUNCE: W3C Workshop on Semantic Web for Life Sciences

> A draft of our position paper is attached. If there is interest, I could
> give a short talk with some more concrete examples of what our data (and
> tools) look like.

Eric,
thanks much for the paper, which was very pleasant to read, esp.
as it gives feedback from a different community we've been so
far get used to.

I've some clarificatory questions below on your "open issues", so
to better understand and focus what your concerns are.

1. Let me rephrase what I think you are saying:
writing a parser for the XML serialization syntax
is quite hard. Is this it, or there is more, like
eg user readability?

2. Clarification: do you mean collections/lists
should not be in RDF, or just that the way they
are represented now is not nice/effective? Either way,
could you provide some motivation/example?

3. Interesting: do your use cases have absolute needs
for reification, or it's just a convenience? Is
your only use just use case 6 (provenance)? And,
when you talk about quads, do you mean the RDF model
should be changed to allow context, or did you mean
just that efficiency of reification handling is
still an open issue and so suitable pseudo-forms
could be developed to provide better tool processing?

4. yes, you're right. No negation, at least for
the moment... (for a reason, as treatment of negation
can be quite hairy...)

5. Could you expand more on this? An example would
shed some light.

6. So, I guess the critique isn't much to RDF per se
but to Web Services, right? Or, are there specific
features of RDF that you were thinking about?

7. Is is really that bad to use plain URI (ramping
debate here, but I'm interested in your opinion.
if it's for your point 11, then 11 could be solved
and therefore using URIs... ;) ?

8. Example? (in particular, it's unclear formally what
"inline" means here)

9. Again, example...?

10. Clarification on "rapid data entry": manual
assembly? Support for some specific features..?

Thanks much!
-M

Received on Thursday, 19 August 2004 19:15:30 UTC