Re: ontology specs for self-publishing experiment

>>>>> "TW" == Trish Whetzel <whetzel@pcbi.upenn.edu> writes:

  TW> Hi all,

  TW> As a terribly simple question, is it possible to take the actual
  TW> FuGE-ML that is generated on a per instance reporting of an
  TW> experiment/study/investigation and then convert than to RDF for
  TW> use with semantic web technologies?


Converting between one syntax and another is fairly simple, and there
are some reasonably tools for it. XSLT would work for converting XML
into RDF. I wouldn't like to use it for converting the other way
(actually I wouldn't like to use it at all, but this is personal
prejudice!). 

This is assuming, however, that the semantics of the two
representations are compatible. To give an example, syntactically it
is possible to convert between the GO DAG and an OWL representation of
GO. However, the GO part-of relationship doesn't distinguish
universal and existential, while OWL forces you to make this
distinction; you can't sit on the fence. 

So, the simple answer to a simple question is: it depends. I wouldn't
assume that FuGE-ML will be convertible into a given
ontology or representation in RDF, unless a reasonable amount of care
is taken in the design of FuGE-ML or the ontology to ensure that it
can happen. 

Course, you could always hack it with some rules and a bit of human
intervention. That works as well. 

Cheers

Phil

Received on Friday, 7 July 2006 10:35:59 UTC