Re: Advancing translational research with the Semantic Web

> That will get you so far, but you have to be VERY 
> careful. Will other uses of these relations 
> retain these very refined meanings this 
> precisely? 

I guess that can be said about ANY conceivable approach. People that do not care can make mistakes, whatever approach we choose.


> Suppose 
> someone wants to say that an assertion made by C 
> is wrong because it mis-uses a name to refer to 
> the wrong entity. 

I don't think that the large majority of biomedical projects will require us to make such statements. As I said, it is clear that we can think of scenarios where we need RDF reification or something similar -- however, most of these scenarios will not be encountered by the large majority of projects. Time will tell.


> One cannot get a 
> satisfactory logic of propositional attitudes 
> (such as belief) by burying them into 'opaque 
> relations' and using a conventional assertional 
> logic. 

I guess we have different standards about what is satisfactory in this context and what is not. In my view, a basic ontology similar to the already existing SWAN ontology [1] would be sufficient for all practical needs. There is no need to come up with an intricate logic of propositional attitudes to implement something like this. 


> RDF, yes: OWL no. The problem arises from 
> equality substitution, and owl:sameAs is equality.

I'm afraid I do not understand what you are referring to.

cheers,
Matthias Samwald

[1] http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_145.pdf

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Yale Center for Medical Informatics, New Haven /
Section on Medical Expert and Knowledge-Based Systems, Vienna /
http://neuroscientific.net



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Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 17:20:16 UTC