Re: Ontology Working Group Proposal Draft

Nice job, Vipul:

Here are my two cents:

For item 2:

I think we should explicitly specify the context when attempting to define the
word "ontology". I don't want to get into the argument with 
philosophers. It is
a debate that hasn't be settled for thousands of years and I don't 
think we can
settle it too.

An "ontology" has two facets - one is an engineer artifacts and the 
other social
agreement (Both of Gruber). The first facet can, and should be, defined in the
context of semantic web.  I don't think in SW you can distinguish a 
"controlled
vocabulary" from an "ontology". If you use URI and use RDF/OWL, it becomes an
ontology in SW.  This is my intention when I brought this up at the meeting.
To clarify the meaning of the word "ontology" not the meaning of "ontology".

About item 3:

You said: "A set of current ontology fragments such as Snomed, MedRA 
and GO will
be represented using these standards ..."

The "standards" you mean is the best practice guidelne? If it is so, 
how can we
represent these ontologies without their involvement?  I am a bit 
confused what
you mean by that?

Also, I though there is an issue which we (or I) mistakenly named as 
"ID mapping
algorithm". The use of word "algorithm" is wrong, what I meant is a 
strategy to
map a lot of existing IDs, such as DOI etc. I think this is an 
important issue,
the BioPax people knows this very well.  It should be the 
responsibility of this
group to provide a recommendation how to provide a context to these IDs.  This
seems missing from the document.

Xiaoshu

Received on Saturday, 4 February 2006 00:43:00 UTC