- From: Benjamin Good <goodb@interchange.ubc.ca>
- Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:45:26 -0700
- To: "Miller, Michael D (Rosetta)" <Michael_Miller@Rosettabio.com>
- Cc: olivier@nlm.nih.gov, matt@biomedcentral.com, public-semweb-lifesci <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
On Jun 5, 2006, at 1:04 PM, Miller, Michael D (Rosetta) wrote: > Hi Ben and Matt, > >> An RDF version of the >> UMLS knowledge sources would be seem to be very useful - at >> least for >> bioinformatics research purposes ... > > What I was trying to discover was, from a purely RDF/ontology > standpoint, what is gained without any other knowledge of UMLS? 1) Accessible URIs for UMLS terms would make it possible (easier..) for any one to annotate their data through reference to this expertly curated common vocabulary. This makes it much more likely that people would actually do so - thus enabling serendipitous/automatic data integration down the road. 2) Even without using the semantics of the relationships, the simple fact that certain concepts are somehow associated with each other is excellent fodder for computation and exploration. 3) By providing RDF, it would be possible to automatically merge RDF generated in other projects with the UMLS. Did I miss any ? > > This question comes more from my ignorance, probably, but when > knowledge > gets buried in specialized tags the tendency is that without going to > the source to understand the specialization, what's left is not all > that > useful. There is no question that you would get maximum value out of a thorough understanding of the meaning of all of the relationships in the RDF and that the farther we can push this understanding into an ontology (or other reasonable representation) the better; but, moving things like the UMLS into RDF and onto the Web IMHO increases their value to the community tremendously and is a necessary step towards actually realizing the semantic web for the life sciences (not A semantic web for the life sciences). -Ben
Received on Tuesday, 6 June 2006 05:45:44 UTC