Re: URIs

On Jun 19, 2006, at 9:49 AM, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
>
> URI http://www.example.com/gene;
>
> You need to dereference the "gene" variable in order to understand  
> it and do
> something meaningful about it.

That's one way. You can also publish a paper that describes it, get a  
bunch of people agree to use it the same way, supply formal logical  
definitions, or a subset of them in OWL.

But you are not required to go to the network and do a geturl, though  
that would be nice, when it is available.

> Answer to (1a), Of course, you can have "variables" that are not  
> intended to
> be dereferenced, in Java script, the type "undefined" is similar to  
> a "404".
> (Please note, a 404 does not mean that the URI does not exist, it just
> implies that at current time, it cannot be dereferenced.) It is not  
> wrong to
> define an "undefined" variable, it is just not much use of it.
> (1b) URI is just the name that refers a location on the WEB, so it  
> of course
> is a name.

It is a names that *sometimes* refers to the web. See my quote from  
the RFC.

> (1c,d) The issue is not "needed" to be or not, it is all about what  
> you want
> to use it.

This is where we agree.

>> Another part of the conversation talked in terms of whether the URI
>> http://www.expasy.org/uniprot/P04637 should, for our
>> purposes, refer to a database record or to a thing in the
>> world - Human P53 proteins.
>
> I think this is an application issue rather than an architectual  
> issue.
> Hence, it will be a design issue. For the first example, in its  
> current
> state, it is "fine" because what is returned back is an text document.
> Then, whoever made such an assertion considers the two electronic  
> documents
> are semantically equivalent.  However, if you intended to make  
> either URI to
> represent the entity of "Cellular tumor antigen p53", it is wrong.

Absolutely. But we usually use the term "application issue" to mean  
that it is specific to a single application. In this case we are  
working together so we really need to set up infrastructure around  
how we define this together. I don't think a pure technical solution  
will handle this.

> How to use of URI should be defined by W3C not by individual user  
> group.
> Otherwise, you will break one web into a bunch of smaller island.   
> That will
> not be what you wanted it for.


W3C knows nothing about Biology. They are good for defining  
standards, but won't help us avoid one person using a gene database  
entry identifier to refer to a protein in one place and a swissprot  
name to refer to what they mean to be the same protein in another  
place. That's what we have to work out.


-Alna

Received on Monday, 19 June 2006 15:42:47 UTC