[Bioperl-l] OntologyTermI

[Matthew Pocock]

Lincoln Stein wrote:
> The nice thing about separating the Term from the DAG is that you can then 
> reuse the same term in different types of graphs, or chuck the graph entirely 
> without scrambling the meaning of the term.
> 
> Lincoln

Does the term /have/ any meaning outside of the graph? I guess any human 
readable description has meaning outside the graph, but the whole point 
of these formal graphical knowledge representations are to put all the 
stuff we can pin down in the graph, not in the human readable text. Are 
the graphs of terms definitely DAGs? I'm not convinced. That would 
restrict the ontology to fairly booring relationships, unless I'm 
missing something here. Perhaps you just mean a hierachial type system - 
the subset or instanceof operator, not a full ontology.

Matthew

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