Names, shared names, and bio-informaticians (was Re: Domain dependent semantics)

[Douglas Burke]

Rob Seaman wrote:
>  We spend a lot of time fretting about issues of astronomical semantics.  It might help to keep these somewhat in perspective.  Others fields have similarly obscure challenges with domain knowledge.  From the Risks Digest (http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.66.html#subj15): 
>
>  	"But when I noticed the CAS number of bis(2-chloroisopropyl)ether was
> 39638-32-9 instead of 108-60-1, that is definitely NOT a typo (unless the
> person entering the data sneezed at that moment.)
> 
> It was clearly a f**kup on the part of the state, obviously caused by the
> fact that bis(2-chloroisopropyl)ether & 2,2'- dichlorodiisopropylether are
> both C6 H12 CL2 O." 
>  
>  The choice of the word "obviously" may be a bit capricious - the underlying issue here is just as complex as some the IVOA faces. 

Tangentially-aligned with Rob's comment above.

I recently attended a day workshop held by the Shared Names group [1,2] 
over at MIT.

The committee (or at least the people who are really trying to push this 
forward) are focussed on a very specific problem, namely that of 
providing a standard name for a record in a life-science database. I 
don't think this is particularly interesting to us, since we currently 
don't really talk about particular records from a database in our 
publications (although perhaps we should be), but I was interested to 
see what the proposed technology stack was like, and the 
social/political issues they encountered.

Overall I didn't really come out of it with anything particularly 
useful, other than the following "insights", which I think I knew anyway :-)

  - naming is contentious

  - if you are going to do something like this you need community by in, 
and to do the work within the auspices of some group that the users 
trust (technically, socially, and is felt to have a long life time)

  - although the focus of the organizers was on naming database records, 
there was a lot of discussion about

    a) how people really wanted to name "real things", such as enzymes 
or proteins or Messier objects or ...

    b) even if you did manage to keep the scope limited, people were 
going to mis-use the names

If anyone wants more info, holler and I'll dig out my notes.

Doug

[1] http://neurocommons.org/page/Shared_names_steering_committee
[2] http://neurocommons.org/page/Shared_names