- From: Marijke Keet <keet@inf.unibz.it>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:17:06 +0200
- To: Eric Jain <Eric.Jain@isb-sib.ch>
- CC: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, wangxiao@musc.edu, Michel_Dumontier <Michel_Dumontier@carleton.ca>, public-semweb-lifesci <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>, Mark Wilkinson <markw@illuminae.com>, Benjamin Good <goodb@interchange.ubc.ca>, Natalia Villanueva Rosales <naty.vr@gmail.com>
Eric Jain ha scritto: > > Alan Ruttenberg wrote: >> There are proteins, and there are records about proteins. Records >> come in different formats. If I make a statement using this url, is >> is about the record? or the protein? How should the agent come to know? > > The concept of "protein" is abstract enough that anything you might > ever say about any specific protein can be said to be just a "record", > so I don't see the point in making the distinction? > and by analogy, then there is no real Eric Jain, just a webpage with that name, a blog, an URL http://eric.jain.name/, some database records in the uniprot HR systems with a string "Eric Jain" and related data, email trails in the hcls archive.... and, well, any person that does not have a representation in some software system does not exist either.... just because proteins are smaller than persons does not make them into mere abstractions--thingies of your imagination that only materialise by means of their representations in some information system. proteins were around for quite a while before you imagined them as mere abstract concepts, and will be so after you and any representation of proteins-as-records-in-an-information-system cease to exist. A good software engineering book that explains such distinctions clearly and at length is: Halpin, T. Information Modeling and Relational Databases. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2001. Best regards, Marijke C. Maria Keet KRDB Research Centre Faculty of Computer Science Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Piazza Domenicani 3 39100 Bozen-Bolzano Italy tel: +39 04710 16128 fax: +39 04710 16009 email: keet@inf.unibz.it <mailto:keet@inf.unibz.it> web: http://www.inf.unibz.it/krdb/ home: http://www.meteck.org <http://www.meteck.org/>
Received on Monday, 16 July 2007 10:17:24 UTC