- From: Eric Jain <Eric.Jain@isb-sib.ch>
- Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:16:45 +0200
- To: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
- CC: Chris Mungall <cjm@fruitfly.org>, Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>, public-semweb-lifesci hcls <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>, Darren Natale <dan5@georgetown.edu>
Alan Ruttenberg wrote: > In that case, I would recommend that it is unwise to use Uniprot ids as > identifiers of protein classes on the semantic web. Doing so would > encourage exactly the kind of ambiguity that we need to avoid in order > to write statements that will not confuse semantic web agents (including > people). The question you need to ask yourself here is whether there really are such things as specific proteins, or if this is always just a useful abstraction (and often a fuzzy one at that, if it wants to make sense for biologists). UniProt has a different idea on what exactly the protein-related entities are than e.g. EMBL_CDS, and others have different ideas, too. Even if you came up with your own protein database that is more suitable for Semantic Web applications because it has better explicit definitions than UniProt manages to have at the moment, I could argue that what you have in the end are nothing but "records, too...
Received on Thursday, 19 July 2007 08:17:10 UTC