- From: Eric Jain <Eric.Jain@isb-sib.ch>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:32:53 +0200
- To: Marijke Keet <keet@inf.unibz.it>
- 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>
Marijke Keet wrote: > 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.... Well, maybe I don't ;-) > 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. The problem with proteins is that I haven't seen any biologists agree on a general way to determine whether two proteins are the same or not, and in fact you could argue that the concept of any specific protein is a helpful simplification that allows people to get their job done -- but depending on what your job is, the optimal simplification may of course differ! With people, I think there is less of a problem: If there is any uncertainty about whether two people are the same, this is more likely due to lack of knowledge than to different ideas of what a person is (though I'm sure there are a few gray areas here, too)...
Received on Monday, 16 July 2007 10:33:35 UTC