I tend to agree with Jerven. He is right to say that URIs work best as
identifiers. However, some things should still be kept in mind:
* The strings we are talking about are in fact IDs and not ambiguous: no
string id identifies multiple objects.
* The problem is in finding the right web page to refer a user to for
each ID. URIs are often distinct from the URLs that users would like to
read. It is even possible that there are already official URIs for some
of the datasets we were talking about, and that these URIs do not help
us in finding the right URL either.
In some datasets, the problem might be solved by switching to URIs, but
this requires a working content negotiation to redirect users when they
open the URI in their browser. I have some doubts that we can find this
for the problematic cases, given that they don't even have a simple
redirection service for finding their URLs.
Moreover, there is the technical problem that the design that has been
selected for distinguishing external IDs in Wikidata is such that these
IDs must be of type string.
In a perfect world, Jerven's approach would still be the cleanest, I
believe, but it might be impractical at the moment.
Cheers,
Markus
On 29.04.2016 15:29, Jerven Tjalling Bolleman wrote:
Could I be so bold to suggest that in Wikidata we should strive
to use external URI's for identifiers not Strings.
For example in Wikidata, there are a lot of UniProt accessions.
e.g. behind the property https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/P352
and there is a formatter for a URL.
I think this is the wrong way round, there should be an URL/URI there
and a formatter to generate a local string for display purposes.
And of course for chembl the URL/URI to use would be
<http://rdf.ebi.ac.uk/resource/chembl/molecule/CHEMBL101690?
There a 2 advantages to this. It allows easier federates queries from
the source databases into wikidata (no URI conversions etc..)
The second is that these URIs are clearly not ambiguous.
Regards,
Jerven
On 28/04/16 23:49, Julie McMurry wrote:
"One should also point out to the authorities maintaining these IDs
that they should spend some effort on producing a workable solution for
this. It seems they should be the first to provide a resolver service
(or maybe it would be an "ID search engine" if it is so complicated).
With the qualifiers in place, Wikidata can also be used to achieve this,
of course, but it seems we are just manually reverse engineering
something that should be done at the site of whoever is controlling the
ID registration."
Well said, Markus. A most hearty agreement here on my side and one
colleagues and I have been trying to raise awareness of for a long time
now (http://bit.ly/id-guidance). One of the challenges is that databases
are already being asked to do more with less. They can see the utility
of such a service to others, but when I've asked DBs before (not naming
names), traction has been limp (I've yet to ask Chembl). Sometimes it
works out though. For instance, KEGG used to have 12 different
type-specific URLs, corresponding to:
kegg.compound
kegg.disease
kegg.drug
kegg.environ
kegg.genes
kegg.genome
kegg.glycan
kegg.metagenome
kegg.module
kegg.orthology
kegg.pathway
kegg.reaction
Thankfully, they've collapsed those to a single URL pattern.
The databases that find it the toughest are not those who simply don't
embed typing, but rather those that don't embed typing AND ALSO have
local identifiers that would otherwise collide. For instance, a
prominent bio database is in this boat (not naming names) and would like
to make things better but it is hard and messy due to the collisions.
FYI 345 of the 560+ records in the identifiers.org
<http://identifiers.org> corpus are type-specific at the level of
identifiers.org <http://identifiers.org>'s namespace; these roll up to
~300 providers.
The question though is what WikiData is trying to accomplish. Say you
encounter the chembl ID CHEMBL308052
<http://linkedchemistry.info/chembl/chemblid/CHEMBL308052> do you need
to retrieve the type of the entity for reasons other than determining
what URL to use?
How are you representing entity labels / IDs to users?
Best,
Julie
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Markus Kroetzsch
Faculty of Computer Science
Technische Universität Dresden
+49 351 463 38486
http://korrekt.org/
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