Re: The UniProt database in RDF format

I've collated these responses and sent them along to the semantic web 
team here at W3C - I'll keep the list apprised of progress.

Eric Jain wrote:

> John Wilbanks wrote:
>
>> what do you mean by "a  mechanism for grouping together
>
> > a set of statements in a file would be welcome"
>
> The problem here is that we do not manage data on the level of 
> individual statements or resources, but by protein, for example. A 
> protein may be described by several resources and many statements. 
> Some resources may be described in detail in a different data set, and 
> therefore only need to be referenced. Other resources are specific to 
> a protein, and therefore need to be stored along with any other data 
> on the protein.
>
> While most people are happy with being able to retrieve data for 
> individual proteins from a web server, some need to download the 
> complete data set. As there are more than a million proteins, 
> distributing the data in separate files, one per protein, is not 
> practical (couldn't find any implementation of zip/unzip that could 
> handle this :-). But if all data is merged into one file, it is no 
> longer trivial to reconstruct the original sets of statements.
>
> Note that TriX introduces a solution for "grouping statements" with 
> help of a "graph" element. Jena on the other hand has the concept of 
> "models".


-- 
John Wilbanks
W3C Fellow
Semantic Web - Life Sciences
http://www.w3.org/People/all#wilbanks
wilbanks@w3.org
617-253-5845 (direct)
617-838-6333 (mobile; best voicemail #)
--

Received on Thursday, 22 July 2004 09:57:18 UTC