On May 11, 2006, at 6:58 AM, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
--Chris
Genes should have their own URIs? That's some 10^16 or so
URIs just for the volume of space that I'm occupying right now.
So what is the problem? There are more concepts exist in the world
than
each of us know. Does it limit ourself from living or learning or
working?
The number of URI is unlimited, what is the big deal? The issue is
not
about space (by the way, how much space is a reasonable space
anyway), the
issue is the design and management.
I guess I didn't make my point very clearly. I was attempting to get
a clarification of whether we were talking about types of genes or
instances
I think if you succeeded in RFID tagging every single gene instance
in all my cells then allocating URIs for each would be a relatively
trivial problem in comparison. But before we set about on that
project I presume we'd first like to assign URIs to gene types such
as "homo sapiens p53 gene"
More useful would be a URI for gene types - eg a URI for the
type "Homo sapiens p53 gene" (or an allele thereof).
Ontologies should exist in any granuality and on any scale, saying
one type
of ontology is more useful than another is arbitrary. A pacifier
is very
useful to my 10-month old son but completely useless to me. Vice
versa is
my laptop to him.
You wouldn't put a representation of your son's pacifier in an
ontology. You would put a representation of the type "pacifier" in
the ontology
Having 10^16 or even 10^16000 genes doesn't matter. What matters is
how we
can carefully modulizes the URIs so that we don't have to import those
irrelevant concepts.
Hmm, the 10^16 genes instantiated in the volume of space occupied by
me are neither irrelevant (to me anyway), nor are they concepts. They
are very real instances of physical material objects - at least under
one definition of gene.
So just to restate:
in your example I presume the ID gene/123 was intended to be an ID
for a gene type rather than an instance - or perhaps not?
Cheers,
Xiaoshu
