What’s in a name? : Sense and Reference in biodiversity information
type: Dataset
description: "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare has Juliet tell her Romeo that a name is just a convention without meaning, what counts is the reference, the 'thing itself', to which the property of smelling sweet pertains alone. Frege in his classical paper “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” was not so sure, he assumed names can be inherently meaningful, even without a known reference. And Wittgenstein later in Philosophical Investigations (PI) seems to deny the sheer arbitrariness of names and reject looking for meaning out of context, by pointing to our inability to just utter some random sounds and by that really implying e.g. the door. The word cannot simply be separated from its meaning, in the same way as the money from the cow that could be bought for them (PI 120). Scientific names of biota, in particular, are often descriptive of properties pertaining to the organism or species itself. On the other hand, in semantic web technology and Linked Open Data (LOD) there is an overall effort to replace names by their references, in the form of web links or Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). “Things, not strings” is the motto. But, even in view of the many "challenges with using names to link digital biodiversity information" that were extensively described in a recent paper, would it at all be possible or even desirable to replace scientific names of biota with URIs? Or would it be sufficient to just identify equivalence relationships between different variants of names of the same biota, having the same reference, and then just link them to the same “thing”, by means of a property sameAs(URI)? The Global Names Architecture (GNA) has a resolver of scientific names that is already doing that kind of work, linking names of biota such as Pinus thunbergii to global identifiers and URIs from other data sources, such as Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and uBio Namebank. But there may be other challenges with going from a “natural language”, even from…
conditions of access: http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/access-right/PUBLIC
conditions of access: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
contributor: Philipson, Joakim
  type: Person
  affiliation: Stockholm University
  family name: Philipson
  given name: Joakim
creative work status: completed
  type: DefinedTerm
  in defined term set: http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/dataset-status
  term code: COMPLETED
creator: Philipson, Joakim
date modified: 2017-01-01
date published: 2017-01-01
has part: D91DBY
keywords: Medical and Health Sciences
  type: DefinedTerm
  term code: 3
keywords: Computer and Information Sciences
  type: DefinedTerm
  term code: 102
keywords: Computer and Information Science
keywords: Medicine, Health and Life Sciences
keywords: Metadata
keywords: PID system
keywords: Biodiversity
keywords: Taxonomy
license: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
publisher: Stockholm University
version: 0

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7910/DVN/BAMCSI

Stockholm University
type: Organization

Philipson, Joakim
type: Person
affiliation: Stockholm University
family name: Philipson
given name: Joakim