- From: Xiaoshu Wang <wangxiao@musc.edu>
- Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 12:14:17 -0400
- To: <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
> Based on that work, I'd like to follow Eric N's penchant for > "strawmen" and propose the following amendments to the > Proposed Classes to give focus to the discussion: > > Project > Study > Hypothesis > ... I honestly think before making the list, we should think about how ontology should be modulized and how to develop ontologies on various granualities. I would suggest to start with an ontology that has a very coarse granuality. And developing more detailed ontologies one step at a time. Using ontology implies that if you want to use one assertion of an ontology, you must agree to all assertions made in the ontology. A detailed monolithic ontology is what we should avoid. I have thought of this problem for quite a while. The BOSS ontology (http://www.charlestoncore.org/ontology/boss) that I created only has a three classes (Study, Protocol and Data) and three pairs of inverse properties. (Please trust me, I am not trying to promote the BOSS ontology here.) What I have really hoped is that we should think how the ontologies will be shared before start building the ontology. The same issue also goes to the overlap between FUGO with the proposed self-descriptive experiement ontology. In fact, I think all biological related ontology will perhaps touche on the topic of experiment in one way or the other. Hence, if each ontology's designers don't factor out their ontology design, the eventual result will be a bunch of overlapping monolithic ontologies. Creating a big monolithic ontology is just the same as creating a conventional data standard, like XML schema or ER model because sharing ontology must consider ontology merging as opposed to schema integration. It transforms the problem but not solve it. Cheers Xiaoshu .
Received on Thursday, 6 July 2006 16:19:33 UTC