Re: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons'

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, William Bug wrote:

> Ditto, Kei!!!
>
> Of course, at the heart of this - in addition to the very important issue 
> Chemezie introduced re: ACL at the graph node level, if that is practical - 
> is the discussion we've been having regarding URIs - how to create them, 
> broadcast/discover them, and guarantee their uniqueness.
>
> The individual tracking issue Kei mentions below is one we've had to deal 
> with on the BIRN project, where different research groups are passing a given 
> subject (or samples from that subject) amongst themselves to perform 
> different sorts of investigation - vital imaging with MRI or fMRI, imaging of 
> dead tissue - the brain - at high rez either with histo-based LM techniques 
> or for some samples EM - also gene expression analysis on matched 
> microdissected tissue punches, ELIZA, etc.
>
> There is also the very difficult issue of being able to stream-line the IRB 
> paperwork across campuses which to some extent depends on being able to 
> "publish" subject/sample level IDs.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the specific needs here, but I wonder if 
authoritative identification of individuals is really an argument for a 
ID-oriented naming convention - such as LSID.

I have a better understanding (than I did before) of what drives the need 
for LSID's from the ongoing discussions, but it's worth mentioning that the mechanics of 
InverseFunctionalProperties (which FOAF uses) can provide a means to 
identify individuals uniquely.  If you label a role/property as being 
inverse functional then you are saying it can only be used on *one* 
individual.  Explicitely:

{?P a owl:InverseFunctionalProperty. ?X ?P ?O. ?Y ?P ?O} => {?X owl:sameAs ?Y}.

As long as your vocabulary has such identifying roles/properties (FOAF 
uses the persons email address, but it could be any centrally managed 
system-wide identifier - I'm certain most institutions have this) you can very easily enable identity reasoning

> This is why we'd started investigating LSID over a year ago, as we need an ID 
> franking authority at least at the subject and or biomaterial sample level. 
> To be honest, I think we've only partly solved this problem, to the extent 
> required to pass animals back-n-forth, and so far we've been using a 
> propriotary authority, which will later need to be mapped to some more global 
> authentication service, possibly LSID-based, or whatever becomes the "best 
> practice" as recommended by the BioRDF group.
>
> Cheers,
> Bill

Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
ogbujic@ccf.org

Received on Thursday, 14 September 2006 14:59:15 UTC