Re: Unstructured vs. Structured (was: HL7 and patient records in RDF/OWL?)

Okay, Davide, this is my fault.

It didn't penetrate my thick skull (even though you explicitly said  
it and even attached the draft!!) that bioRDF had already taken  
ownership of this.

So long as somebody has it, I'm happy as a clam.

John

John
On Feb 10, 2006, at 4:50 PM, Davide Zaccagnini wrote:

>
> Using GRDDL (or better, exploring its use) to generate RDF from  
> unstructured
> (ok, non-RDF) data is already in the BIORDF group proposal. I think  
> it makes
> sense to leave it there and other groups willing to look at GRDDL  
> from other
> angles should feel free to do so.
>
> Davide
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org
> [mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of John Madden
> Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 4:26 PM
> To: public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Unstructured vs. Structured (was: HL7 and patient  
> records in
> RDF/OWL?)
>
>
> This discussion is fine, but let me bring this back to GRDDL.
>
> GRDDL could be used to specify ways of generating RDF from many kinds
> of XML documents. The documents could be data-oriented XML, or text-
> oriented XML, or even (I think this is accurate, Eric?) could be
> documents with very sparse XML markup where the extraction transform
> operates exclusively on CDATA.
>
> In any case, I'd like more discussion on the issue that: use of GRDDL
> to extract RDF from healthcare-oriented documents, especially non-
> html documents, is an important focus of HCLS, and one of the
> workgroups should take ownership of this issue.
>
> John
>
> On Feb 10, 2006, at 1:01 PM, Gao, Yong wrote:
>
>>
>> Having trained as a computational linguist, one thing I remember
>> vividly is the
>> debate among linguists on the issue of semantics vs. syntax. One of
>> the wisdoms
>> I gained from that experience is the saying "One man's semantics is
>> another
>> man's syntax." (I'll need to dig deeper to find its origin.)
>>
>> Having worked on building practical tools for data extraction and
>> integration,
>> I've learned the lesson on the importance of NOT getting too
>> boggled down on
>> labeling what's "structured" and what's not. Here I quote another
>> saying "One
>> Man's Ceiling is Another Man's Floor"
>>
>>
>> The point I'm trying to make is this: The concept of
>> "structuredness" is
>> relative and context-sensitive. For example, natural language texts
>> are highly
>> structured, it's just we still have a long way to fully discover
>> and understand
>> its structures and use them to find meanings mechanically.
>> Another example, HTML pages are structured so that web browsers can
>> display them
>> properly. XML and RDF data can as well be "unstructured" if you put
>> a blob of
>> text, say abstract, between a pair of tags.
>>
>> I would almost suggest the term "non-RDF", rather than
>> "unstructured", be used
>> in the context of transforming some data into RDF format.
>>
>> ---
>> Yong Gao, PH.D.
>> MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MIND)
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Saturday, 11 February 2006 05:20:00 UTC