- From: Samson Tu <tu@SMI.Stanford.EDU>
- Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 13:57:26 -0700
- To: public-swbp-wg@w3.org, tu <tu@SMI.Stanford.EDU>, "Natasha F. Noy" <noy@SMI.Stanford.EDU>
The working note "Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web: Use With Individuals" W3C Working Draft 21 July 2004 uses the same representation for the two use cases "Christine has breast tumor with high probability" and "Steve has temperature, which is high, but falling". However, there is a possible semantic distinction between the two that should be modeled explicitly. "Christine has breast tumor" uniquely determines "high probablity." If you think of diagnostic-relation/person/disease/probability as a relation, then the first 3 forms a key. A use case "At 2004/07/31 10:00, Christine's temperature is 39 degrees" illustrates the the distinction better than the "Steve" use case. In the temperature/person/value/time-stamp relation, temperature/person/value triplet does not determine the time stamp. In that sense, the "value/time-stamp" pair is the real "value" of the binary temperature relation. Samson -- Samson Tu email: tu@smi.stanford.edu or Senior Research Scientist swt@stanford.edu Stanford Medical Informatics phone: 1-650-725-3391 Stanford University fax: 1-650-725-7944
Received on Thursday, 12 August 2004 20:59:26 UTC