Re: blog: semantic dissonance in uniprot

     Hello Mark, All,

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Mark Wilkinson <markw@illuminae.com> wrote:
> I agree - the issue also came up at the BioHackathon last week... basically,
> as Tom Oinn phrased it, "if you're thinking of using owl:sameAs... don't!"

  Is that a suggestion to abolish owl:sameAs?

> Another predicate is needed that is less "rigourous" - owl:kindOfLike  :-)

  What do we gain from non-rigorous statements? I am assuming that
when UniProt says "same as", they really mean "same as". It is better
to know a statement is wrong than to not know whether it's right or
wrong.

  Besides, how do we know it's wrong? Two species can have the same
protein for different functions, right?

> I think there is another, potentially more nefarious concern in the
> statement that Ben was objecting to in his post.  The statement was:
>
> http://www.uniprot.org/tissues/229 (subject)
> http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#sameAs (predicate)
> http://purl.uniprot.org/po/0009009 (object)
>
> my concern is whether http://purl.uniprot.org/po/0009009 is intended to be a
> class, or intended to be an instance... since owl:sameAs is only supposed to
> be used to claim the "identicalness" of two individuals, not an individual
> to a class...

  Must be an individual, then, doesn't it?

     Take care
     Oliver

-- 
Oliver Ruebenacker, Computational Cell Biologist
BioPAX Integration at Virtual Cell (http://vcell.org/biopax)
Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling
http://www.oliver.curiousworld.org

Received on Wednesday, 25 March 2009 17:04:21 UTC