- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:18:18 -0500
- To: M. Scott Marshall <mscottmarshall@gmail.com>
- Cc: Chime Ogbuji <chimezie@gmail.com>, Andrea Splendiani <andrea.splendiani@bbsrc.ac.uk>, MMVagnoni@mdanderson.org, James Malone <malone@ebi.ac.uk>, HCLS <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>, Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
If I might summarize this debate, the arguments for using opaque and meaningless identifiers seem very similar to the argument that since there is a danger of shooting oneself in the foot, that therefore it is best to prevent this by having all feet surgically removed at birth. Still, HCLS is, thank God, a comparatively small community taken at a planetary scale, so I guess y'all should do whatever suits you. Just as long as this particular madness is not infectious. Pat Hayes On Jun 20, 2011, at 3:15 PM, M. Scott Marshall wrote: > Hi Chime, > > The main reason is that when semantics and natural language are > inserted into identifiers, some identifers are doomed to become stale > as thinking evolves or changes about the semantic representation. Or > when a new 'name brand' is created for that namespace: I think that > the best example of this was provided by Jonathan Rees for Shared > Names - ever heard of 'locuslink' identifiers? I believe that Entrez > Gene occupies the name branding of that space now.This is precisely > the sort of problem that Shared Names would like to avoid by serving > (non-ontological) identifiers from a 'neutral namespace'. In > ontologies, the same principle applies (I see that Helena has supplied > a good example). > > I agree with Mark about proper tooling - the tools should > automatically display labels. It's true that I don't know of a SPARQL > editor that does this to a satisfying degree yet, (except for one: > SPARQL Assist Lanugage-Neutral Query Composer from McCarty et al, > shown at SWAT4LS in Berlin :) See Mark's post.) but that is not a > reason to create identifiers and your knowledge representation in a > way that won't stand the test of time. > > Shouldn't we consider RDF to be the bytecode of knowledge? Although I > understand the difficulty of dealing with non-human readable > identifiers in SPARQL and RDF, I believe that we are now looking at > bytecode and complaining that it isn't human readable. It's true that, > until the tools are available, it is difficult to write SPARQL > queries. But if we applied the same logic to gene accession numbers, > where would we be now? The SPARQL queries will eventually be 'under > the hood', supplying labels to a GUI near you. :) > > Cheers, > Scott > > On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 9:34 PM, Chime Ogbuji <chimezie@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Monday, June 20, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Andrea Splendiani wrote: >> >> Hi, >> sorry to jump on this thread like this... >> >> To be honest, I'm kind of concerned by the insistence on semantic-opaque >> identifiers. >> >> I am as well and I have been for some time. >> >> I understand the reason for them, >> >> Actually, I would be interested in hearing the reason for them enumerated, >> because I have had a hard time imagining what could possibly offset the >> (significant) impact on readability that it has on biomedical ontologies. >> The barrier is already high for non-logicians and non-semantic web >> aficionados to use biomedical ontologies. Why set it any higher? >> -- Chime >> > > > > -- > M. Scott Marshall, W3C HCLS IG co-chair, http://www.w3.org/blog/hcls > http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall > > ------------------------------------------------------------ IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 mobile phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Tuesday, 21 June 2011 01:19:10 UTC