Re: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons' - ACL level of granularity?

Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
>> Absolutely.  However, concensus on a placeholder class for a 
>> person doesn't prevent you from extending it with other 
>> attributes (or relationships with other classes) at a latter 
>> point - that's one of the advantages of the expressiveness of 
>> Description Logics.
>>
>> Seems to me the biggest barrier is in coming to a concensus 
>> on an appropriate placeholder vocabulary and not neccessarily 
>> on determining all the various ways in which a person (and 
>> their related data) could be expressed in a patient record.
> 
> +1
> 
> Let's not to worry about those extensions now.  When Ivan brought up this
> topic, I think what he meant is a very general use cases, much more in the
> scope of the vCard. Otherwise, we will be in an endless debate on what kind
> of properties we should put in a Person.  A Person is what a Person is.  The
> first thing to do is to specify the most "desirable" properties across all
> areas, not just in the LSHC.  Then, we can develop different kind of Person,
> Patient, Doctor, Nurse, Researcher, etc., But all of them should share some
> common properties like name, email, address etc. 

That's pretty much the approach we took in FOAF. It doesn't make sense
to be overly proscriptive, I think. The current spec says just:

	The foaf:Person class represents people. Something is a foaf:Person
	if it is a person. We don't nitpic about whether they're alive,
	dead, real, or imaginary.

We also try to ground this concept in the (for now) English language, by
linking to an RDFization of Wordnet 1.6, ie. admit that we can't do much
more than note that it's useful to have a class associated with this
lexicalised concept, ... even if nobody has ever achieved worldwide
consensus on a formal definition of personhood. Most likely, nobody ever
will. Despite that, we somehow still seem to more or less communicate
with each other.

Whether Patient, Doctor, Nurse etc are better modelled as subclasses of
Person, rather than using some concept of named role, is something I'd
love to get a public-semweb-lifesci perspective on. I won't ask about
foaf:dna_checksum right now though... :)

cheers,

Dan

-- 
http://danbri.org/

Received on Thursday, 14 September 2006 15:52:01 UTC