[xtm-wg] Re: Trying to locate zoological taxonomy

["Ronald Poell" <rapoell@notionsystem.com>]

Murray,

In reply to your private mail, because I think other people might be 
interested.

>  If the notion system is a complete ontology representable in XML,
>  why not attempt an XTM expression of it? 

Just to be clear: Notion System is an application that knows various 
export formats (HTML, XML, RTF, NSDS (Notion System Data Structure = 
Pre-XML structure comparable to XML).
For storage it has its own internal format.
XTM might be one of the export formats but there are two reasons why I 
don't do it:
- no time available for it
- at TNO we are working on an Java implementation of a symantic 
network that eventually will replace Notion System.

>  How would it relate to
>  other ontologies (for example, Cycorp, of which I'm working on an
>  XTM expression)?

One of the major aspects of ontologies is that from a certain point in 
time it reaches stability. The notions (or topics) in NS change all 
the time. The only thing that is stable over time for a particular 
notion is its NID (Notion ID) (usable as a PSI).
Some notions occur already within some ontologies (e.g. Cycorp's) and 
there can be mapping info within NS for this (just another 
relationship).
An important thing here is that some relations (predicates)(special 
notions) also occur in some ontologies. The same thing for languages 
and notion classes.
I see the contents of Notion System more as a Semantic Network than as 
an ontology, besides the fact that it is virtually impossible to 
isolate a particular domain within the data. Another difference with 
TM is that occurences in NS are just relationships with other notions 
(documents). You can look at a document notion in exactly the same way 
you can look at an animal.

> I'm probably leaning toward more of a simple taxonomy, but having
> it populated by web resources as topic occurrences would be very
> interesting. 

My experience with zoological and botanical taxonomies states clearly 
that SIMPLE taxonomies don't fit the purpose. Over time scientists 
changed their visions about how species should be classified or named 
(in particular in botanics and fossils). This makes it very complex to 
identify a reference somewhere in a document (be it web-based or not) 
because you will need the context of the document (publication year, 
author, etc).
Simple text-based expressions simply don't work often.
Another aspect is that there are two major classifications: 
traditional Linee and the rather new cladogenetic classification. The 
leaves of both (basically tree) structures are the same because they 
are the species or subspecies. The grouping elements on the other hand 
are completely different in most cases.

Friendly greetings

Ronald Poell


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