If you follow ontoclean [1], then all you need to know is that if not all people are patients, then patients is a subtype of people. m. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OntoClean On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Freimuth, Robert, Ph.D. < Freimuth.Robert@mayo.edu> wrote: > > For instance, Physicians are not the same thing as Patients, but a > Patient can also be a Physician. > > ...and a physician can be a patient, both of which are roles that entities > can play. IMO, this illustrates the importance of defining roles and > entities separately (rather than through inheritance from a common parent). > > Bob > > ------------------------------ > *From:* public-semweb-lifesci-request@listhub.w3.org on behalf of Jim > McCusker > *Sent:* Wed 5/23/2012 9:40 AM > *To:* Aaron Brown > *Cc:* Dan Brickley; Renato Iannella; Lin MD, Simon; Matthias Samwald; > public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org > > *Subject:* Re: RDF Schema / LODD mapping -- Re: New proposal: health & > medical extensions to schema.org > > On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Aaron Brown <abbrown@google.com> wrote: > >> Ok. But I still don't see why this needs to be specified explicitly. >> Otherwise, wouldn't it also be necessary to specify that a MedicalEntity is >> disjoint from a Movie, a SocialEvent, a DryCleaningOrLaundry, etc? It seems >> to get out of hand pretty quickly. For that matter, if someone wanted to >> extend the proposed schema by defining a Physician type that inherits from >> both Person and MedicalEntity, I think would be OK. >> > > RDF and other semantic web standards allow for instances to have multiple > unrelated types. This is part of the Open World Assumption, and is a good > thing, since it allows us to discover classifications for things later on. > In order to create the same sort of single inheritance that one sees in, > for instance, Java, simply make each sibling under a given class disjoint > with all its other siblings. I would be reluctant to do that blindly, > though, as it can often result in modeling errors. For instance, Physicians > are not the same thing as Patients, but a Patient can also be a Physician. > > Jim > -- > Jim McCusker > Programmer Analyst > Krauthammer Lab, Pathology Informatics > Yale School of Medicine > james.mccusker@yale.edu | (203) 785-6330 > http://krauthammerlab.med.yale.edu > > PhD Student > Tetherless World Constellation > Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute > mccusj@cs.rpi.edu > http://tw.rpi.edu > -- Michel Dumontier Associate Professor of Bioinformatics, Carleton University Chair, W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and the Life Sciences Interest Group http://dumontierlab.com
Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2012 15:02:56 UTC