Hi Joel -
No you didn't miss my point. And to clarify, in order to allow occurrences of wolf packs, we do need to allow for them to be included in the scope of Individual, don't we? So whether it matters or not that a wolf pack is included in the scope of Individual or not doesn't just depend on the query but also on the data you want to apply it to, no? For example, if we decided that wolf packs are outside of the scope for Individual, then the query below wouldn't find their occurrences because they would be represented in a way different from the Individual linked to the occurrence though DwC:ofIndividual.
But frankly, I should have kept my mouth shut to start with. For one, the suggestions I have made don't seem to be useful, so I'd rather not add to the confusion further by making more. Personally I also think that mailing lists are rather poorly suited for sorting out ontology building questions when there is considerable controversy and divergent viewpoints, and I think this and other parallel threads demonstrate this nicely. For this reason, other communities I'm familiar with save up such issues and sort them out in dedicated face-to-face meetings (sometimes called jamborees). In my experience there is no good substitute for that.
-hilmar
Sent with a tap.
On Jul 27, 2011, at 10:32 PM, joel sachs jsachs@csee.umbc.edu wrote:
Hey Hilmar,
I probably don't understand your objection. The data does matter, and I'm assuming that it will be in rough accordance with the ontology. The query referred to below was
select ?occurrence where { ?occurrence rdf:type dwc:occurrence . ?occurrence dwc:ofIndividual [individual] . }
for some specific value of [individual].
If I read your example correctly, there's an occurrence of an individual named "wolfpack". So if I'm querying for occurrences of "wolfpack", then your occurrence would be returned.
But maybe the point of your example isn't that the individual is named wolfpack, but that the individual *is* a wolfpack, and the rdf is bad. In this case, yes, problems will arise.
One question that your example raises (and is maybe related to what you have in mind?) is: Supposes we allow Individuals/BiologicalEntities to include wolf packs. How would we query for occurrences of wolf packs? One proposal on the table last Fall was to include some sort of scoping property for the Individual class, e.g. scope="individualOrganism", or scope="Population". We could also define individualOrganism and Population to be subClasses of biologicalEntity.
Please let me know if I've missed your point entirely.
Joel.
On Wed, 27 Jul 2011, Hilmar Lapp wrote:
On Jul 27, 2011, at 10:25 AM, joel sachs wrote:
When answering this query, does it matter whether the scope of Individual/Biological Entity includes organelles or wolf packs? Does it matter if the Individual/BiologicalEntities are taxonomically homogeneous? To me, the clear answer to both questions is no.
Isn't that pretending that the data against which you ask this query doesn't matter? What if the data had a data <x> with <x> rdf:type dwc:occurrence>; <x> dwc:ofIndividual "wolfpack"?
-hilmar
=========================================================== : Hilmar Lapp -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org : ===========================================================