- From: Matthew Cockerill <matt@biomedcentral.com>
- Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2006 23:04:18 +0000
- To: "Tom Stambaugh" <tms@stambaugh-inc.com>
- Cc: "hclsig-pub" <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
I agree that the details of gene function probably don't belong on Wikipedia. However, as these two recent articles Are the current ontologies in biology good ontologies? Larisa N Soldatova & Ross (Nature Biotechnology) htttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nbt0905-1095 Time to Organize the Bioinformatics Resourceome Nicola Cannata, Emanuela Merelli, Russ B. Altman* PLoS Comp Biol http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010076 both discuss, one of the key problems with current biomedical ontologies is that they are not well embedded in a coherent set of higher level ontologies. Biomedical ontologies need simple concepts such as "institution" and instances of those concepts. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Medical_School Or as another example of a high level concept in need of a URI, the JPEG2000 file format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jpeg2000 It's at least conceivable that Wikipedia may play an important role in providing widely accepted identifiers for such high level classes and instances, since the high level of usage of wikipedia would tend to keep those high level concepts far better maintained and curated than they would be in the backwaters of a specifically biomedical ontology. Matt On 8 Feb 2006, at 21:39, Tom Stambaugh wrote: > > >> You raise important issues on this. But I take the converse >> position, I >> think: >> [snipped] >> > What he said ... and ... > > A more tightly focused Gene Function Wiki (or perhaps "interwiki"...) > promises to provide specific benefits to the life science community > for the > same reason that the existence of Encyclopedia Brittanica does not > preclude > publication in "Nature" and "Science". Were we to begin posting the > contemplated content into Wikipedia, I suspect it wouldn't take > long before > we'd be accused -- at least by some -- of "wiki-squatting" > (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiSquatting). Never mind how the wikipedia > community might hear our proposals to add experimental semantic web > markup > to wikipedia. >
Received on Wednesday, 8 February 2006 23:04:16 UTC