Re: Advancing translational research with the Semantic Web

On May 18, 2007, at 1:16 AM, Marijke Keet wrote:

> Staying with article comments but going off topic from this thread,  
> there were two aspects in particular that read oddly and raises  
> more questions than that it provides information. One about the  
> BioRDF, the other the ontology working group.
>
> First, on BioRDF: ``BioRDF has the goal of converting a number of  
> publicly available life sciences data sources into RDF and OWL.''  
> This sounds very much like preparing for use of Semantic Web  
> technologies as opposed to using them. Given the many legacy data  
> and the need for mappings, is there an intention to do something  
> about standardization, structuring, or coordination of those  
> transformations? (e.g., there are several efforts on OBO-to-OWL  
> mappings).

All the various flavours agree on the logical translation (ignoring  
the issue of the temporal aspects in the RO relation definitions) -  
they just disagree on things such as which annotation properties to  
use for alternate labels and text definitions and that kind of thing.  
But then this is no different from the rest of the OWL world anyway.  
The demo Alan put together uses the official OboInOwl mapping.

The situation here is easy compared to translating other data  
sources, eg annotations made from conclusions and hypotheses stated  
in the scientific literature, where there are a large number of  
logical interpretations. I think it is too early to standardize here,  
we simply don't have the logical expressivity yet, so we have to  
produce a number of different translations in which we either  
overstate or understate w.r.t entailments depending on what we want  
to do with the results.

Received on Friday, 18 May 2007 17:21:04 UTC