[Tcs-lc] Generality of concepts

Gregor Hagedorn G.Hagedorn at BBA.DE
Wed Mar 30 07:22:21 PST 2005


Greg wrote:
> > Some time ago I made the suggestion of a nomenclatural change from
> > "taxonConcept"  to "Concept" - Roger suggested "Taxon" - because I would
> > also like to use TCS to document concepts such as "White-Box woodland",
> > in part defined in terms of included taxa.  We might stretch the "taxon"
> > concept to cover the elements within a classification of ecological
> > communities but the possibilities are endless?
  
Rich answererd
> I'd never considered using TCS to define "EcoConcepts".  My brain is already 
too
> full to consider the implications....but if this sort of generic approach is 
> desired, I would at least suggest "BioConcept".  The word "concept", by 
itself,
> has too many homonyms.

I propose to stick with TaxonConcept.

SDD needs two different concept hierarchies, one for taxonomy (the classes 
being described) and one for descriptive concepts (structural, methodological, 
property). The latter we call a "concept tree" - which is shorthand for 
"descriptive concept tree".  

I think Greg's suggestion to consider also including synecological taxonomy as 
a potential application. I think "Taxon"/"TaxonConcept" is able to capture 
this. In the European Braun-Blanquet plant ecology system people actually have 
a syn-nomenclature with priority of naming and all.

I do not think using "Concept" alone is too helpful in TCS. Similar to SDD, it 
would just be a shorthand for a specific kind of concept concept. The 
real general schema for all is something like OWL, which can be used to express 
most of what we want, except that I believe it would be rather difficult to 
provide or consume, exactly because of its generality.

Gregor----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Königin-Luise-Str. 19           Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203



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