- From: Drew McDermott <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu>
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 12:05:22 -0400
- To: public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
> [wangxiao@musc.edu] > > Quoting "Miller, Michael D (Rosetta)" <Michael_Miller@Rosettabio.com>: > > > You're correct here but it is the state of the art. Interestingly > > enough, I've found that in general the biology-based scientists and > > investigators are not all that bothered by this confusion and despite > > the confusion seem to make their way through it. > > The problem is that semantic web is intended to make machine to > understand. And > the clarity is a prerequisite to instruct machine unambigously. Naming genes is an interesting case where proper names shade into generic names. However, I think on balance genes tend to have so many idiosyncratic properties that their names are never going to fit into a systematic naming scheme very well. But remember, the key contribution of the semantic-web methodology is to use URIs as names --- period. So long as a URI means only one gene, and everyone agrees what gene it means, there is no ambiguity problem. It's also a good idea to avoid having more than one name for a gene, but multiple names do not constitute ambiguity, merely inefficiency. -- Drew McDermott Yale Computer Science Department
Received on Tuesday, 15 August 2006 16:05:42 UTC