[Biocorba-l] Annotations

[Thomas Down]

On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 10:35:08AM +0100, Martin Senger wrote:
> > 
> > > last couple of weeks, I've been looking at RDF Schema and DAML as mechanisms
> > > which could be used to define annotation schemas.  This ought to retrofit
> > > quite cleanly on top of the current Annotatable/Annotation API.
> > 
> > Martin could you comment this. How the constrained vocabulary
> > server/Candy etc. fit on this?
> >
>    I do not know what is meant by "annotation schemas" - so I do not know
> if "Candy" can help. The "Candy" is a Java (and optionally CORBA)
> implementation of an official OMG module (submitted by EBI and NetGenics
> as a part, but very separate part, of Genomic maps spec) for controlled
> vocabularies. It was meant to be simple - if you need more there is an OMG
> Lexicon service. The Candy is avalable at http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/candy.

A schema mechanism is one step beyond controlled vocabularies.
As a simple example of how I look at this sort of thing:

  CV:     ``Annotation bundles may contain a property called
            "percentage-identity" (and optionally define some
            semantics for this).''

  Schema: ``Features of type "repeat" have a property of type
            "double" named "percentage-identity".''


On the other hand, using controlled vocabularies is half the
battle.  I'll take a look at Candy.

Thanks,

   Thomas.