RE: SemWeb BOF @ ISMB 04

>I believe one of the main problem in life science is the same as the
>original problem that Eric Neumann has posted.  That is how to refer part 
of
>non-RDF document.

>In my cases, my concern is this.  For some applications, such as data 
submission
>and retrieval, I actually wanted the gel encoded in a "compact" form.
>Personally, I don't think XML is a good solution because there are more
>overhead than the actual payload.  Neither will RDF a good solution for 
the
>same reason.  It is not that difficult to create an arbitrary format to
>encode the gel data in a compact text based format but then I don't know 
how
>the URI should be assigned to each individual spot.  The URI for the spot 
is
>important because if a spot is IDed or used to perform MS.  The URI can 
make
>it easy to associate other type of descriptions.

If I have understood you correctly, you are describing one of the use 
cases for the Life Sciences URN identifier. A single LSID can describe and 
give remote programatic access to both your data (the gel data in the 
format you invented or some other standard format appropriate to that data 
if one exists) and  any amount of metadata in RDF that describes that data 
and its cross-relationships with other entities. 

Once an LSID name is created for any data and made available, third 
parties (or other applications) can use it to attach their own RDF 
metadata to the data you have named with that LSID. Any LSID can be used 
in RDF as an indentifying URI (a resource), but with the difference that 
your software can automatically dereference it to discover and retrieve a 
copy of the data it names and the metadata that describes it. This may in 
turn include pointers to further LSID named resources.


Kindest regards, Sean

--
Sean Martin
IBM Corp.