Not true Matthias.
Having worked directly with bench scientists for many years, they
view data and databases as "extensions" to what they are really
interested in.
Your example of "bank" and "bank" are disjoint and non-related; in
the case of gene and gene-data-record there is a kind of containment
relationship, hence why transitivity gets used.
The evidence for what I point out is found everywhere: "P12345 is
expressed in some tissues"... according to Alan's points, this would
be a wrong statement. Otherwise, this discussion of bio-things vs
data-records would be obvious to everyone on this thread, and from
what I can see there is no general consensus yet.
Eric
On Jul 16, 2007, at 4:48 PM, Matthias Samwald wrote:
>
>> the life science community has for years applied an implicit
>> transitivity to records of things, so that when many say:
>> "http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345 is expressed only in
>> species homo sapien"
>> they usually imply that "the protein referenced by
>> datarecord:http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345 is expressed only
>> in species homo sapien"
>
> This is like arguing that people can easily distinguish homonyms
> like "bank" (the thing you can sit on) from "bank" (where you store
> your money), therefore it might be Ok to use the same URL for both.
>
>
>> Consider that it may be impossible to change the non-software part
>> of the LS community on how they think about records vs. conceptual
>> entities that exist in the real-world (non-IR).
>
> Well, they might talk like database entries and physical objects
> would be the same, but this is not what they *think*. With the
> Semantic Web / ontologies we want to capture the semantics and the
> actual thinking, not the linguistic / textual surface representations.
>
> - Matthias Samwald
>
Eric Neumann, PhD
Senior Strategist, Teranode Corporation
W3C co-chair Healthcare and Life Sciences Interest Group
MIT Fellow, Science Commons
+1 781 856 9132