Steve,
You are making this sound as if the alternative identifications are discarded, they are not.
For those that are interested in the identification history they can look at the information from the level of the individual or below.
If an individual was misidentified then the occurrence record can be updated to link to the corrected species concept.
If someone wants to create there own alternative set of identifications they can freely do so and those will be linked to the other data so people can choose.
There are a number of ways that alternative identifications could be handled.
For instance, lets say that TaxonomistA and TaxonomistB never agree on an identification.
These could be separated by the use of different predicates.
txn:occurrenceHasSpeciesConcept => Concept_A_URI bioimages:occurrenceHasSpeciesConcept => Concept_B_URI
Now these do not conflict.
In your arboretum are the tree's labeled with all the scientific names and concepts, including the incorrect ones, or just one?
If they were wouldn't visiting children and congressmen ask *so which one is it?*
Respectfully,
- Pete
On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.eduwrote:
OK, I think that I have already probably said more than people want to hear on this subject. So I will stop with this:
- It does not appear that there is anything "wrong" with the
taxonconcept.org from a technical standpoint. It does what Pete wants it to do and that is very cool. 2. I believe that there are aspects of the taxonconcept.org (introduced for convenience in querying) that make it much more complicated than I think are necessary to represent the core conceptual entities in the biodiversity informatics community. I believe (for reasons articulated previously) that some of those complexities may introduce problems in a distributed system where people of different institutions are linking to each other's URIs. 3. I believe that the way that taxonconcept.org conceptualizes some of these core entities is not congruent with the most common opinions that I have heard expressed on this list. Note that I am not saying that the taxonconcept.org conceptualization is "wrong". I am saying that in some ways it differs significantly from what I perceive to be the community consensus. On the issue of the representation of taxa and names I am going to have to defer to the opinion of others (and there is no shortage of people on the list who are experts on this subject). However, I will say that if one says:
And get results free of all inappropriate identifications.
Do you want the misidentifications showing up in these species lists?
How would a general user correctly determine which of these identifications are correct?
who is going to be the judge of "correct"? I don't want to be around when that cat fight erupts. I do think there ought to be some way that a determiner can indicate that they may have made a mistake on their own Identification. But I think multiple Identifications better be multiple opinions or else there will never be a system that will be supported by diverse participants.
Steve
On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Steve Baskauf < steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
Thanks, Bob, for the examples. I will try to dig my way through them.
I don't want to give the impression that Darwin-SW was not intended to facilitate any reasoning. That is, after all why it is called "Darwin-SW" instead of "Darwin-data-markup". I know that Cam is quite interested in the "semantic" end of it, and when he has Internet again I hope he will chime in on this. I'm simply confessing what my primary concern is (data markup). When we started working on the ontology, we decided to make it as simple as possible while still trying to permit every (or almost every) kind of class and relationship that was discussed in the Oct/Nov discussion. The result was to have a single class Occurrence whose instances are described by properties, not 1.7 million classes N#occurrence and so on for the other six classes in the model. The intention was that DSW 1.0 would be constructed in such a way that it could support the addition of more complex components (Cam has actually marked the posted version at version 0.2 which means that it is certainly subject to improvement) and possibly more complex reasoning. But the more complex stuff was not put into the model at the start because we wanted something that (hopefully) most people could agree represents reality reasonably well (at least a TDWG form of reality since it uses the structure of DwC as its basis) and hence it would actually have the possibility of being used by more than two people.
I hope that people realize that I'm not making these comments to give Pete a hard time or anything. I really am trying to understand the relative benefits and problems of modeling on class of cat with many properties vs. creating a class of cats for every property we care about. Clearly Pete's interest is in Taxon Concepts in the sense that he has defined them. OK, just to set up a straw man, let's say that I am interested in geography more than taxonomy. So I define a class and URI for every state and province in the world. I have no idea how many of those there are, but I'll guess 400. Now I want to describe other things in the biodiversity informatics world. So I mint classes http://baskaufgeo.org/lod/ohio#occurrence for occurrences that happen in Ohio, http://baskaufgeo.org/lod/swaziland#occurrence for occurrences that happen in Swaziland, http://baskaufgeo.org/lod/tennessee#occurrence, http://baskaufgeo.org/lod/ohio#taxon, http://baskaufgeo.org/lod/swaziland#taxon, http://baskaufgeo.org/lod/tennessee#taxon, etc. etc. for all 400 state/provinces and all seven basic types of things in the biodiversity domain. I can now do cool queries that involve geography.
OK, maybe I'm somebody else and I love thinking about temporal relationships. So I create http://baskauf-time.org/lod/1959may#occurrence for occurrences that happen in May of 1959, http://baskauf-time.org/lod/2005may#occurrence for occurrences that happened in May of 2005, etc. Given a billion or so years of life on earth, that would give me about 12 billion classes for each of the six other basic kinds of things I want to model. I could do all kinds of cool queries that involve time now.
So which one of these three ontologies are we going to adopt? The taxon based one? The time based one? The geography based one? Now we are not just having to chose whether to model things as a single class of cats whose instance have many color and reproductiveMethod properties vs. many classes of cats each defined on the basis of its color. We must decide whether it's better to have many classes of colors each defined by the kind of animal that has that color, or many kinds of reproductive systems, each with different kinds of animals, etc. Where is it going to end and how could we agree on which system to use? It seems to me that it would be better to have a class of cats, a class of reproductive systems, etc. and connect their instances with properties.
Am I somehow thinking about this incorrectly? Steve
Bob Morris wrote:
See, for example,
Mungall et al., “Integrating phenotype ontologies across multiple species”, Genome Biology 2010, 11:R2 doi:10.1186/gb-2010-11-1-r2)
Ward Blondé et al. "Reasoning with bio-ontologies: using relational closure rules to enable practical querying", Bioinformatics (2011) doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btr164
Calder, et al. "Machine Reasoning about Anomalous Sensor Data"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2009.08.007 or in manuscript form at http://efg.cs.umb.edu/pubs/SensorDataReasoning.pdf
...
OK, so maybe these knowledge domains are all hypothesis-driven sciences (i.e., sciences), and <whatever dsw is modelling> is not. But that would be sad.
Bob p.s. I had almost finished something else on this thread when Hilmar beat me to the punch. But here's a slightly different expression of his point:
It turns out that the differences between instances and classes is mainly important in contexts in which you have declaimed interest, namely reasoning. In the RDF/RDFS/OWL stack, enforcing a distinction between classes and instances only occurs pretty high up in the stack, when one desires an OWL variant that will offer guarantees that reasoners will finish any inference they are asked to verify, preferably in less than exponential time . I guess, but am not certain, that even in an LOD context, if data are described with an OWL ontology that is known to be intractable, e.g. not in OWL DL, that it is possible to design SPARQL queries that will never complete. In fact, I believe that even with tractable ontologies, there are SPARQL queries that are fundamentally exponential in the number of variables.
p.p.s. Irrelevant, but equivalent, aside about mathematics. At the turn of the 20th century, Whitehead and Russell tried (and failed) to show that everything about numbers could be logically derived from an axiomatic description of the natural numbers (i.e. non-negative integers). It was later shown to be the case that you must include in your logical foundations something deeper, namely the ability to have sets that are elements of other sets (roughly, classes that are individuals in other classes.). Without this, and starting only with the natural numbers, you can logically derive all rational numbers (fractions) and their arithmetic properties, and even all the irrational numbers that are are the solutions of polynomial equations with integer coefficients ("algebraic numbers") such as sqrt(2), and even solutions of the polynomials that have coefficients that are algebraic numbers. But without introducing the notion of the set of subsets of a set, you cannot logically derive the all the interesting transcendental numbers (i.e. those which are not the roots of polynomials), such as e and pi. So if you love calculus, you better not insist on distinguishing instances from classes. But if you are content with polynomials, you can probably be ontologically sloppy. Or, if you don't care about logical foundations of your science, you can forget about the whole thing. :-)
On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 11:51 PM, Steve Baskaufsteve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
[snip] OK, so let's imagine that we mark up several million records of specimens, tissue samples, and images as RDF. (We don't have to imagine very hard, I think the BiSciCol group is planning to actually do this within the next several months.) I would really like to hear from some of the people who actually use "DL reasoners" (a group which certainly does not include me) to know what it is that we could actually find out that would be useful about that big data blob using reasoners. I have already confessed that my primary concern is enabling data discovery, transfer, and aggregation using GUIDs and RDF. I'm still somewhat of a "semantic web" skeptic as far as the whole inferencing thing is concerned. Aside from inferring "duplicates", I'm really wanting to know what else there is useful that could be reasoned outside of the Taxon/TaxonConcept class. (I can imaging useful reasoning being done about things in that class like the relationships among names, concepts, parent taxa, etc. e.g. Rod Page's Biodiversity Informatics 3:1-15 article https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jbi/article/view/25) I think this (data markup priority vs. inferencing priority) is an important discussion to have before the tdwg community can settle on some kind of consensus way of turning database records into RDF, particularly if it is going to have a big influence on the way the RDF model is set up. To me, there is a clear and immediate need to be able to mark data up in a straightforward way. If we can get the semantic part, too, that would be great but not at the expense of data markup. I just was at a meeting of a bunch of herbarium curators. They desperately need a way to implement GUIDs and aggregate data and they need it now. I really don't think they care one whit about inferencing. If we coalesce on a model that is great for doing cool things with 10 records but which can't handle hundreds of thousands of records easily and simply, then we are wasting our time. I don't think we need to dither about this for another five years.
I would hate to have to draw an RDF graph of that model
I would as much hate to have to draw an RDF graph of 1.7 million instances. The point being, in order to draw a graph of how someone models a domain you don't draw a graph of the entire RDF triple store.
That was the point I was trying to make (I think).
Thanks for the clarification, Hilmar. Steve
-hilmar
=========================================================== : Hilmar Lapp -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org : ===========================================================
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
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-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
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Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 Email: pdevries@wisc.edu TaxonConcept http://www.taxonconcept.org/ & GeoSpecieshttp://about.geospecies.org/ Knowledge Bases A Semantic Web, Linked Open Data http://linkeddata.org/ Project
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu