- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:59:40 -0400
- To: W3C HCLSIG hcls <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 14:13 +0000, Bijan Parsia wrote: > On 25 Mar 2009, at 10:41, Phillip Lord wrote: > > > "Michel_Dumontier" <Michel_Dumontier@carleton.ca> writes: > >> 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. There may not be a pragmatic reason for *your* applications, but there may well be for others, as explained below. > > > > I've given a clear example. Where two databases exist, with two > > records, > > which appear to be referring to the same (class of) molecules. > [snip] > > This is the key example. > > But there's the other key example, where one record exists which > appear to be referring to multiple entities (either by ambiguity or > by composition). This is a generalization of your point about ill > definedness of the very idea of a gene. > > To paraphase you (I think), introducing a resource in the latter case > takes you from 1 mapping problem to 2 mapping problems. > > This is why the the Boothian line is quite naive. Sorry, but this is not a case of naivete. If nobody ever wants to use the same property to talk about the database record as was used to talk about the molecule, and nobody ever makes an assertion that implies that the class of database records is disjoint from the class of molecules, then I don't see any harm in using the same URI to ambiguously denote both. But if one is trying to design data to be reusable by others in unforeseen ways, there clearly *is* a risk that someone will want to make such assertions in conjunction with the data, and if that happens there is a clear harm. This risk is easy to avoid by using separate URIs. There *are* trade-offs. Minting two URIs instead of one *does* add some complexity, though as I pointed out that additional complexity can be mitigated to the point that it is a *very* low cost. Still, different people will weigh these trade-offs differently, and what's best for one situation may not be best for another, as I indicated in my original post. Furthermore, even if one does use the same URI to ambiguously denote both a database record and a molecule, that is not the end of the world either. It is possible (though more difficult) to later separate out and relate the different senses of an ambiguous URI, as I have described: http://dbooth.org/2007/splitting/ Ambiguity is inescapable, and ambiguity between a thing and a page that describes that thing is not fundamentally different from other kinds of ambiguity (except perhaps that we are aware of it in advance and it can be easily avoided), as explained here: http://dbooth.org/2007/splitting/#httpRange-14 Finally, although it is flattering that you have named this suggestion after me, I cannot take credit. As I pointed out in my original post, the suggestion to differentiate between a molecule and the database record that describes that molecule originates with the Architecture of the World Wide Web: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#URI-collision and best practices for implementing this distinction are described in Cool URIs for the Semantic Web: http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris David Booth
Received on Thursday, 26 March 2009 00:00:18 UTC