RE: blog: semantic dissonance in uniprot

> I just want to focus on the essence of my comments to Michel and Peter
> who have issues with the use of 303 redirection to achieve separation
> of
> datum identity from descriptive representation, when using a
particular
> URI scheme.
> 
> I am simply interested in explaining to them what this is trying to
> achieve since it remains a strange point of contention.  I use the
word
> "strange" because I believe that the mechanics of the process  are
> obscuring the fundamental concept in play: Object Identity.

And I'm trying to explain that there is no pragmatic reason to make
explicit the distinction between a biomolecule (and what we know about
it) and a database record (and what we know about the biomolecule)
unless they are actually different.  It just complicates things in a
wholly unnecessary way. Your talk of identity does not address this
problem. Increasing the complexity of the model, without citing its
benefits (and acknowledging its disadvantages) will certainly not
convince me. Yet, as others have noted, we are not facing a problem
whose solution is this record/entity distinction. 

That being said, it may surprise you that I've been a proponent giving
pointers to documents where description may vary (for example
http://ontology.dumontierlab.com/Protein). But if you're just gonna
redirect me to your one defining document (from a database no less)
where you can attach all the document metadata you want anyways - why
bother! LOL.

-=Michel=-


> 
> Kingsley
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Bijan.
> >
> >
> >
> 
> 
> --
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog:
http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
> President & CEO
> OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
> 
> 
> 
> 

Received on Tuesday, 24 March 2009 18:03:21 UTC