[MOBY-dev] registering INB services in Canada

[Pieter Neerincx]

On  10 Dec 2006, at 14:08, Martin Senger wrote:

>> I don't see anyone else responding to this so far.
>
>
> Well, I have not replied because I did not know how to say politely  
> "what
> you are asking for sucks" :-). I am 100% with you -  we either  
> share or we
> are dead.

I agree. This sounds to me like the same problem which occurs when  
people find out someone else has already registered their favorite  
internet domain name: too bad you are too late! BioMOBY works only  
well if we share the same ontology which works with a first come,  
first registered policy.

On the other hand the idea of a manually curated ontology does not  
sound bad too me. Surely it causes extra work, but lets look at the  
past. There are many biological concepts that were first labeled more  
or less at random causing a big mess with synonyms, homonyms, etc.  
Later on standardization committees were appointed to clean up the  
ambiguity. It happened to species names, genes, proteins, chemical  
compounds, you name it... Groups like HUGO are doing a fine job, but  
especially gene and protein names are still a disaster for data- and  
text-mining software. Maybe we should have started curating the  
ontology yesterday...

So I like the idea of manually curating the ontology (and I volunteer  
for some of the work that might cause), but I would have liked the  
idea even more if the people at INB would have made it a community  
effort from the start :).

Cheers,

Pi

>
> Martin
>
>
> -- 
> Martin Senger
>    email: martin.senger at gmail.com
>    skype: martinsenger
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