Re: Seeking Help with finding an assertion

Hi Karen,

Your questions remind me of the following classic article written by 
Robert Robbins on "Challenges in the Human Genome Project".

http://www.esp.org/umdnj.pdf

Although it doesn't directly answer the questions, in the "Nomenclature 
Problems" section (p. 20-21), it discusses the significant problem of 
inconsistent knowledge representation. It says that it's mistake to 
believe  that terminology fluidity is not an issue biological in 
database design. It also says that many biologists don't realize that, 
in a database bulit with 5% error in the definition of individual 
concepts, a query that joins across 15 concepts has less than 50% chance 
of returning an adequate answer. The section also points out the 
importance of formal representation of scientific knowledge in 
addressing the inconsistency and nomenclature problems. Semantic Web and 
standard ontologies provide a solution to these database problems. We 
just don't simply convert an existing database syntactically into a 
semantic web format, but we also need to do careful semantic conversion 
to eliminate as many errors, ambiguities, and inconsistencies as 
possible in order to reduce the costs of knowledge retrieval and discovery.

-Kei

Skinner, Karen (NIH/NIDA) [E] wrote:

>Recently I read somewhere (on this list, a blog, a news story, where...?) an assertion that struck me as an interesting passing fact at the time.   As I recall, it indicated that more websites are accessed via a search engine than by typing a URL into a browser web address bar.
> 
>Alas, I did not save the reference, and now I am looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Namely, what is the exact assertion, who asserted it, and where did they make it?  If anyone in the world has this information or knows how to get it, or or has related data, I imagine they would belong to this list. I would be most grateful for any useful pointer.
> 
>Along this same vein, if anyone has any statistics, data, anecodotes or information related to the cost of 
> 
>(1) "friction" arising from inefficient or inappropriate efforts at information retrieval
>and
>(2) the cost of "negative knowledge" about an existing resource or data,
> 
>these, too, would be helpful.
> 
>(For example, with respect to #2 above, we are all familiar with comparison shopping for goods and services. We seek data/information about prices and quality , but at what point does the expenditure of that effort exceed the value of the information learned?)
> 
>I am not looking for examples at the level of a philosophy or ecnomics Ph.D. thesis, but rather a few examples in the sciences that can be used at the level of an "elevator speech."
> 
> 
>Karen Skinner
>Deputy Director for Science and Technology Development
>Division of Basic Neuroscience and Behavior Research
>National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH
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Received on Wednesday, 4 July 2007 17:53:08 UTC