Re: Draft list of ucd-words

From: Pierre Didelon <pdidelon-at-cea.fr>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 10:13:48 +0200

Norman Gray wrote:

>
> Greetings,
>
> On 2005 Jun 29 , at 16.47, Rob Seaman wrote:
>

>>>  If a table is published in ApJ that defines the "altitude" of  their 
>>> observatory (pos.earth.altitude), it is not for us to say  the writer 
>>> was a fool, it is for us to make sure there is a UCD  for that concept.
>>
>>
>> Right - and I agree with Steve that this should rather be called  
>> "height".

>
>
> The Gene Ontology folk have described a few key ideas that helped them
> create a big and very successful ontology. Though GO has problems --
> some quite fundamental -- non-ontologists do actually use it to do
> actual science. Some of these `rules' are rather obvious, such as
> `involve users', but Rob's message is a hook for a couple of the
> non-obvious ones.
>
> GO uses opaque labels for every concept, so that pos.earth.altitude and
> pos.earth.height would both be ucd12345 or something. They do this (i)
> to avoid arguments about which noun it should be, (ii) so they can
> version them easily (when are we going to have fight about replacing
> pos.earth.height with pos.earth.height2? whereas no-one has a
> sentimental attachment to ucd12345), (iii) so users aren't tempted to
> use their intuition about what the labels mean, and are forced to use
> the project's tools to discover and resolve labels, and (iiia) to make
> it transparently clear to everyone that the label really doesn't matter
> -- it's just a string which keys to a careful description elsewhere.
>
> I'm not suggesting replacing all the UCDs with numbers (don't worry),
> but suggesting that it might be best to avoid `obvious' names, and even
> that it might be a virtue than a vice to have names which are mnemonic
> but still vague enough to force folk to look up careful definitions
> _before_ they use them.
>

Agree ;-)
"the Word is not the Thing it represents" (Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933, Alfred KORZYBSKI)
or "the word dog doesn't bite".
The words didn't really matter if we agree about the descriptions/definitions.

>> The way to extend a robust UCD process into the future is to  provide 
>> an explicit namespace mechanism from the start.  This will  allow 
>> capturing controversial or peripheral identifiers such as  VOConcept, 
>> but will also allow us to wipe the etch-a-sketch clean  with new 
>> version(s) of subject dependent list(s) of UCDs.  If later  we decide 
>> that v1:pos.earth.height should indeed have been  
>> v2:pos.earth.altitude, there needs to be a lightweight way to make  
>> the transition.

>
>
> Hear, hear. One of the other GO maxims -- up there with `involve the
> users' -- was `version the ontology'. It seems the GO is in more-or-
> less continuous flux, but this simply doesn't matter, because they
> recognised at the outset that they were going to have to do this, and
> so designed their formalism and tools to cope/help with it.

Descriptions can change, as a lot of things... including our minds :-)
>
> I hope this helps. All the best,

I allways appreciate your interventions.
>
> Norman
>
>

-- 
Pierre
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Received on 2005-06-30Z10:14:10