Re: RE: RE: [BioRDF] URI Resolution

On Fri, 9 Feb 2007 Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote:
> I'm curious why you are treating this case so differently from the
> case of finding information about an information resource.  I
> assume it is because with information resources you are only
> interested in information from that information resource and not
> from third parties. Is that correct?

Partly correct, I would phrase it differently. When we retrieve an information resource, we can retrieve the information resource ITSELF (e.g. a .JPEG file). We are not interested in the RDF statements that surround the resource in this case. Both information and non-information resources can have surrounding RDF statements -- retrieving these statements appears like a wholly different process to me. I would like to have these different processes distinguished, not only because they might require different technical implementations, but also for reasons of clarity.

> I suggest we distinguish between two kinds of information about
> resources:
>
> - Primary Authoritative Information 
> - Third Party Information

These terms are very useful for this discussion.
However, I guess in my view of the Semantic Web, there is no significant distinction between 'primary information' and 'third party information'. In my view, the Semantic Web in the life sciences should be centered on descriptions of non-informations resources (e.g. a protein) and not on the description of information resources about these non-information resources (e.g. a Uniprot entry with the sequence of the protein). One of the big advantages of RDF/OWL is that it allows us to make such direct statements about reality without additional layers of abstraction.
In this scenario, there is hardly any 'primary authoritative information', as no one has the authority to 'own' a certain kind of protein. Once someone minted and published a URI for the protein, this URI can be used by anyone. The agent that minted the URI has no further authority about it, and most relevant statements about the resource will be made by others.

-- Matthias Samwald

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Received on Monday, 12 February 2007 11:10:52 UTC