[SEEK-Taxon] Thoughts on GUIDs

[Robert A. Morris]

Well, actually I didn't mean to suggest any particular definitions of 
any of these relationships---nor could I since I learned everything I 
know about taxonomy in Mr. Siegler's 10th grade biology class in Red 
Bank, N.J in 1959. (If Red Bank is a familiar name, that's because  it's 
the place in the 1999 film "Dogma", where Linda Fiorentino saves the 
world from fallen angels played by Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck. I really 
intend that biologists make those definitions and was observing that 
whatever they mean, finding relations on the guid() values that are a 
suitable reflection of the relations the biologists assert on the 
concepts--however defined--would be a desirable feature of the guid() 
function that would make it useful as more than a key into databases.



Richard Pyle wrote:

>>guid() is the function that, given a concept returns its guid. Whether
>>it comes from the concept instance document or the algorithm that
>>assigns it ought to be immaterial.
>>
>>S here was meant to be the relation "isTheSameConceptAs". So in natural
>>language, that expression would be the requirement that
>>
>>   c1 is the same concept as c2 if, and only if, their guids are identical
> 
> 
> I don't mean to sound like Bill Clinton in trying to define the word
> "is"....but in this case, I think it's important to define what we really
> mean by "same concept as".  From how you describe it, I see "same concept
> as" in the very strictest sense.  For example, if I have a dataset that
> reports Species X from Locality Y, that dataset would need to assign
> "Species X" to a particular concept GUID (of which there may be many for
> "Species X"), and then that concept GUID is matched indentically to some
> universal metadataset for the GUID, as well as to other datasets that
> reference the same GUID.
> 
> This is a very different "same concept as" function of "S" than would be
> another core component of the SEEK model, which is to make the statement:
> 
> "Concept GUID 1234 is congruent with concept GUID 4567"
> 
> They maintain their separate GUID values because they are *potentially*
> different (that is, that congruency is an interpretation, rather than an
> objective statement).
> 
> 
>>  If c3 is a synonym of c2 and c2 is a synonym of c1, then c3 is a
>>synonym of c1
> 
> 
> I take it that your use of "is a synonym of" is different from "is the same
> concept as" (i.e., that c1, c2, and c3 would necessarily have different
> GUIDs)?

Yes, I was referring here to my limited understanding of taxonomic 
synonomy of the underlying names. In my lurking here and in TDWG events 
and lists, I haven't noticed anyone discuss whether when names get 
synonomized something comparable happens to associated concepts. So I 
was being somewhat inventive, hoping that the plain English wasn't 
entirely meaningless. Per above, I believe that my actual point is 
independent of whether I spoke stupidly about particular relations in my 
attempted examples. In particular, I really didn't mean to start a 
discussion of any /particular/ relations, perhaps other than the one(s) 
that should be equivalent to the identity relation on the guids. Plus, I 
was hoping that these relations have formal expressions on a formal 
representation of the concepts.

Bob


> 
> Aloha,
> Rich
> 
> 
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-- 
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466