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

I think one thing to consider is that a person in the biomedical  
domain can be two quite distinct things:
a person with a role in some investigation and so on... (there was  
some previous thread about things like this) and a "biological  
material"... the fact that we are the ones studying ourselves  
confuses things a little bit.

FOAF may be related to the concept of people as part of a biomedical  
organization, maybe not all the terms... but even Jabber ID may make  
sense.
On the other end, people as subject of study may have completely  
different dimensions... think about how to relate a cancer line line  
to and individual...

But once you separate these two domains, I think things gets more  
clear, no ? Expecially for identification. To identify a patient as  
someone whose web-blog is.... makes no sense. It makes for a researcher.

Anyway, then things can be unified and all umbiguity/incompleteness  
may be tolerated in this case.

best,
Andrea



Il giorno 16/set/06, alle ore 05:19, Xiaoshu Wang ha scritto:

>
>
>> If there are aspects of FOAF that are of use to biomedical
>> science (I'm not sure what these are), then these should be
>> separated out into a minimal ontology. If people want to
>> reason over databases to determine if genotypes correlate
>> with foaf:OnlineGamingAccount then they can do so by linking
>> the appropriate ontologies, but foaf:jabberID must be
>> strictly separated from ontologies for doing science.
>
> +1
>
> That is my feelings too.  I have always thought that one of  
> ontology design
> principles should make each ontology's conceptual domain  
> "orthogonal" to
> each other.  Although there is no object criteria to determine the  
> "domain
> orthogonality", it is still more of an art than science.   
> Nevertheless, it
> is something that we should keep in mind when designing ontology,  
> orthogonal
> ontologies improve each ontology's sharing and reuse.
>
> With regard to FOAF, I agree with Chris that it might be better if  
> FOAF can
> separate the Person into a different ontology, somewhere in the  
> scope of the
> vCard.  Agent etc., might as well be another minimimal top ontologies.
>
> IMHO, inadequate separation of ontology's domain will have some  
> serious side
> effects in the long run.  Aside from wasted bandwidth and  
> computation to
> handle the unnecessary statement, but when more ontologies are  
> shared, the
> chance for incur conflict will increase and makes the sharing ontology
> impossible.
>
> Xiaoshu
>
>

Received on Monday, 18 September 2006 15:25:50 UTC