Pete, I think that what you need to remember is that a lot of people on this list just don't know as much about the Linked Data world as you do. For example, I think I was the guilty party for suggesting an incorrect use of rdfs:seeAlso . That was based on a faulty memory of something I read six months ago. So what seems to be resistance in many cases may just be ignorance or misinformation. The other part of it is that to some extent we are in the process of cramming a square peg in a round hole in trying to make existing biodiversity informatics terms, databases, systems, etc. work in the LOD world. Those things weren't necessarily designed to work with LOD and it's going to take some time and education to figure out how to round off the corners enough to make them fit. A lot of people have invested a lot of time, effort, and money in square pegs and they are not going to be willing or even able to just throw them all away and suddenly buy all new round pegs. I think that there are a significant number of people in this community who are willing to give Linked Data a shot, but it's going to take some time and education. You might know that certain predicates are widely used, but since I'm not spending much of my time immersed in the LOD world, I won't necessarily know those predicates - to a large extent I'm getting my education from this list. I'm not really following what is being discussed elsewhere - not enough time.
Steve
Peter DeVries wrote:
This discussion of what specific meanings to assign to various widely used predicates reminds me how often this list seems to prefer operating only within itself.
A number of these kinds of issues have been discussed elsewhere.
The argument has always been made that we should use standards but when those standards are not those proposed on this list they seem to be ignored.
Whether it is the appropriate use of rdfs:seeAlso or other existing widely used vocabularies. Note below a separate Annotations vocabulary.
Respectfully,
- Pete
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Tim Clark* <tim_clark@harvard.edu mailto:tim_clark@harvard.edu> Date: Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 1:34 PM Subject: Re: best practice relation for linking to image/machine-opaque docs? biomedical use case To: "M. Scott Marshall" <mscottmarshall@gmail.com mailto:mscottmarshall@gmail.com> Cc: HCLS IG <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org mailto:public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>, public-lod@w3.org mailto:public-lod@w3.org, Daniel Rubin <dlrubin@stanford.edu mailto:dlrubin@stanford.edu>, "John F. Madden" <john.madden@duke.edu mailto:john.madden@duke.edu>, Vasiliy Faronov <vfaronov@gmail.com mailto:vfaronov@gmail.com>, Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk mailto:tai@g5n.co.uk>, Peter DeVries <pete.devries@gmail.com mailto:pete.devries@gmail.com>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org mailto:timbl@w3.org>, Paolo Ciccarese <paolo.ciccarese@gmail.com mailto:paolo.ciccarese@gmail.com>, Anita de Waard <A.dewaard@elsevier.com mailto:A.dewaard@elsevier.com>, Maryann Martone <maryann@ncmir.ucsd.edu mailto:maryann@ncmir.ucsd.edu>
Hi Scott,
For referring to a portion of an image, let me point you to work in my group done in collaboration with HCLS Scientific Discourse Task, UCSD, Elsevier, and one of the major pharmas. Paolo Ciccarese is the main author, and this work is based on the earlier W3C project Annotea.
AO, Annotation ontology, here: http://code.google.com/p/annotation-ontology/, presented at Bio Ontologies 2010, and full-length paper in press at BMC Bioinformatics.
Bio Ontologies 2010 slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/paolociccarese/ao-annotation-ontology-for-science-...
AO uses a special subclass of Selector to specify the part of the document (image) being referred to.
see here for Selectors: http://code.google.com/p/annotation-ontology/wiki/Selectors
and here for an example of image annotation: http://code.google.com/p/annotation-ontology/wiki/AnnotationTypes
Best
Tim
On Jan 10, 2011, at 11:30 AM, M. Scott Marshall wrote:
[Scott dusts off old use case and pulls from the shelf. Adjusts subject of thread. Was: best practice for referring to PDF]
In Health Care and Life Science domains, image data is a common form of data under discussion so a best practice for referring to an image or to an (extractable) feature *within* an image would cover a fundamental need in biomedicine to point to 'raw' data as evidence (as well as giving meaning to the raw data!).
A clinical example from breast cancer: There is a scan that produces an image that contains features referred to by the radiologist as 'microcalcifications', which can be indicative of the presence of a tumor.
I can think of a few scenarios that would refer to the image data (mammogram). There are probably more:
- The radiology report (in RDF) asserts the presence of
microcalcifications and refers to the entire image as evidence. 2) The radiology report (in RDF) asserts the presence of microcalcifications and refers to the entire image as evidence, along with a image processing/feature extraction program that will highlight the phenomenon in the image. 3) The radiology report (in RDF) asserts the presence of microcalcifications and refers to a specific region in the image as evidence using some function of a 2D coordinate system such as polyline.
The question: How can we refer to the microcalcifications as an indication of a certain type of tumor in each case 1, 2, and 3 in RDF?
I am especially interested in the 'structural' aspects: How do we refer to the image document as containingEvidence ? How can we refer to a *region* of the image in the document? How can we refer to the software that will extract the relevant features with statistical confidence, etc.?
Any ideas or pointers to existing practices would be appreciated. I'm aware of some related work in multimedia to refer to temporal regions but I am specifically interested in spatial regions.
Note that an analogous question of practice exists for textual documents such as literature in PubMed that can be text-mined for (evidence of) assertions.
- Note: 2D is a simplification that should come in handy in
implementations and often deemed necessary, such as thumbnails.
-Scott
-- M. Scott Marshall, W3C HCLS IG co-chair, http://www.w3.org/blog/hcls Leiden University Medical Center / University of Amsterdam http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall
http://staff.science.uva.nl/%7Emarshall
On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 4:01 PM, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org
mailto:timbl@w3.org> wrote:
It is well to look at and make best practices for the things we have if we don't
It was the FOAF folks who, initially, instead of using linked data, used an Inverse Functional Property to uniquely identify someone and then rdfs:seeAlso to find the data about them. So any FOAF browser has to look up the seeAlso or they don't follow any links.
So tabulator always when looking up x and finding x see:also y will load y. So must any similar client or any crawler.
So there is a lot of existing use we would throw away if we allowed rdfs:seeAlso for pointing to things which do not provide data. (It isn't the question of conneg or mime type, that is a red herring. it is whether there is machine-redable standards-based stuff about x).
Further, we should not make any weaker properties like seeDocumentation subproperties of see:Also, or they would imply We maybe need a very weak top property like
mayHaveSomeKindOfInfoAboutThis
to be the superProperty of all the others.
One things which could be stronger than seeAlso is definedBy if it is normally used for data, to point to the definitive ontology. That would then imply seeAlso.
Tim
--
Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 TaxonConcept Knowledge Base http://www.taxonconcept.org/ / GeoSpecies Knowledge Base http://lod.geospecies.org/ About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base http://about.geospecies.org/