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

[Matthew Graham]

Hi,

Danny Ayers said use the DBPedia name for an object if there is one in  
his Linked Data talk at the recent semantic astronomy workshop.

	Cheers,

	Matthew


On May 13, 2009, at 1:00 PM, Douglas Burke wrote:

> 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
>