Hi Richard,
On 2 Dec 2009, at 16:36, Antoine Isaac wrote:
On 2 Dec 2009, at 02:40, Peter DeVries wrote:
I was thinking that the species itself should be a class so that
individuals
of that species would be instances of that class.
Probably another skos:Concept class.
So an individual species concept class like that for the Cougar
would be an
instance of a skos:Concept (SpeciesConcept) class and also be a
skos:Concept
class (Cougar) of it's own.
Individual animals would be instances of the skos:Concept class
(Cougar).
Two issues.
1. I don't think that individual animals should be typed as
skos:Concepts, but rather as something like ex:Specimen or ex:Animal.
So, the Cougar class should be a subclass of ex:Specimen or ex:Animal
rather than of skos:Concept. In the words of Bernard Vatant,
skos:Concepts are "library business objects" (or "taxonomist business
objects"?); Bob the cougar in the zoo next door doesn't seem to fit
that definition.
Well, couldn't your questioning put the other way round? I thought
that Peter was indeed starting from items that are very much
"taxonomist business objects", hence very easy to represent as concepts.
One simply has to be aware that skos:Concepts in a skos:ConceptScheme
are not the same as the real-world entities they stand for, and Peter
has to be clear which one he is talking about.
+1
And in fact, while I understand that it is not very intuitive to have
Bob the cougar as a skos:Concept (even though it is technically
allowed), I see less problems for dealing this way with the class of
cougars...
Mentioning that you see less problems without going into any detail is
not exactly useful. I see more problems.
Yes, I should have been clearer.
In fact the most important argument (as I understand it from the discussion you started at [1]) against considering a given entity as a skos:Concept is that this entity may not have been designed as part as a knowledge organization endeavour. It is for example rather far-stretched to say that a person like Michelle Obama was conceived as part of a knowledge organization system.
My point is that this is less problematic for classes, as these are items of a knowledge
organization system from the start. They are also "taxonomist business
objects", aren't they? So we could easily treat them as skos:Concepts.
We have in fact touched this aspect in some parts of the SKOS documentation
[2,3,4]. I'd be very interested to know whether you think this is wrong view!
Best,
Antoine
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2009Nov/0000.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-skos-primer-20090818/#secskosowl
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#L896
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#L1170
Best,
Antoine
2. I'm not sure if it's wise to use the same URI for the Cougar
"concept" and the Cougar "class". I don't think that this "punning"
is against any spec, but it will cause endless head-scratching among
potential users of your data. It would be more straightforward to
mint a separate URI for the class, and relating it 1:1 to the species
concept using an appropriate property (there's probably one in UMBEL;
if not, mint your own -- maybe "speciesClass"). Since you own the URI
space anyway, minting new URIs would be cheap.
This kind of punning between concepts, things and classes is an
interesting issue, and I'm afraid that it's not yet well understood.
Avoiding it puts you on the safe side.
That being said, can you talk a bit about your motivation for wanting
to re-use the same URI?
Best,
Richard
This should work with OWL2 but I don't know how well it will work
with the
LOD.
Also I created a VERY preliminary OWL document that would contain a
much
more complete representation of the species.
My thoughts are that these OWL documents would be used to help
determine
what specimens are instances of what species concept.
The goal would be to provide an OWL document for those who need a more
complete description of what we mean by the URI, while
also providing a much lighter RDF representation that could be used for
concept mapping etc.
However, I don't know if I am going about this in the right way.
Below are my VERY preliminary examples of what these OWL documents
might
look like.
The example has some attributes that I thought should be included in a
species document, but it does not have everything that would like to
eventually include.
http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/owlses/v6n7p/2009-12-01.owl
Doc's at http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/owlses/v6n7p/owl_doc/index.html
The common classes etc, would eventually be moved to a separate
ontology
that would be imported into each individual species ontology.
And these ontologies will need to be fixed so that they work
together, I
don't think they do right now.
Thanks in Advance, :-)
- Pete
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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
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