SDIWG:Meeting Minutes 20080530

Minutes of a tcon on 20080530

Subject: Update development path of BRO

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Attendees: Natasha Noy, Csongor Nyulas, Daniel Rubin, Mark Musen, Ivo Dinov, Beth Kirschner, Peter Lyster

Decided to merge the technology and development paths of the resource terminology and the tags(properties) in the RDF-based BRO. Also, tools that are released on the www.ncbcs.org/biositemaps will deliver content in RDF.

Discussion: In the past biositemaps, there was a separate (but connected) development path for • Protégé forms resource ontology • XML tags that were encoded in the (v4.0) xsd file It is now only important to recognize this so that we are clear about the genesis in case it is needed for future discussion—this is essentially a human communication issue, and not really technical (with one possible caveat below).

We agreed to merge the previous separate threads into a single BRO which encodes the resource ontology as class names, and encodes the (previously XML) tags as class properties. Thus consumers of BRO may be only interested in the terminology or in the class properties (in the latter case they use the null class). In general, Biositemaps is interested in both.

Comment: wondering if we probably should stay away from standards discussion, such as w3c (although it is appropriate to bring standards up in discussions among ourselves, because such discussions help inform us). Rather I suggest our focus is on the tools we produce. We are now producing tools that are disseminated from the www.ncbcs.org/biositemaps web site, so what matters is how we present the tools to potential users (FAQ, *.exe download, cheat sheets, …), e.g., it is now no longer sufficient to say ‘use any old XML editor’ or ‘any old RDF’ editor (was it ever?), but rather there are idiosyncrasies of the BRO which demand specialized biositemaps editing tools (which satisfy the 5% solution and the (future) 95% solution), and how we address potential consumers who might want to build ‘iTools’ equivalents for their own purposes.

Comment: Hopefully BRO will have uses for annotating resources other than the use in Biositemaps project.

Caveat: Peter Lyster hopes that the merging of the technology and development paths of the resource terminology and the tags(properties) in the RDF-based BRO will not cause problems in the (inevitable?) case that we have to generate multiple branches of the BRO (even at the top level) to accommodate disparate (and potentially unresolvable needs of) communities, e.g., scientific computing and clinical informatics.