A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Identifying PIDs playing FAIR

  2019. Joakim Philipson.

  Article

  This is an extended, revised version of Philipson (2017). Findability and interoperability of some PIDs, Persistent Identifers, and their compliance with the FAIR data principles are explored, where ARKs, Archival Reource Keys, were added in this version. It is suggested that the wide distribution and findability (e.g. by simple ‘googling’) on the internet may be as important for the usefulness of PIDs as the resolvability of PID URIs – Uniform Resource Identifiers. This version also includes new reasoning about why sometimes PIDs such as DOIs, Digital Object Identifiers, are not used in citations. The prevalence of phenomena such as link rot implies that URIs cannot always be trusted to be persistently resolvable. By contrast, the well distributed, but seldom directly resolvable ISBN, International Standard Book Number, has proved remarkably resilient, with far-reaching persistence, inherent structural meaning and good validatability, through fixed string-length, pattern-recognition, restricted character set and check digit. Examples of regular expressions used for validation of PIDs are supplied or referenced. The suggestion to add context and meaning to PIDs, making them “identify themselves”, through namespace prefixes and object types is more elaborate in this version. Meaning can also be inherent through structural elements, such as well defined, restricted string patterns, that at the same time make PIDs more “validatable”. Concluding this version is a generic, refined model for a PID with these properties, in which namespaces are instrumental as custodians, meaning-givers and validation schema providers. A draft example of a Schematron schema for validation of “new” PIDs in accordance with the proposed model is provided.

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• What's in a name?

  2016. Joakim Philipson. TDWG 2016 Annual Conference, Santa Clara de San Carlos, COSTA RICA, 5-9 December, 2016

  Conference

  "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 a not entirely coherent system of scientific names, to a semantic web ontology, a solution to some of which have been proposed recently by means of so called 'lexical bridges'.

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• The Purpose of Evolution

  2008. Joakim Philipson (et al.).

  Thesis (Doc)

  In late 19th century Russia, Darwinism was viewed as a measuring-rod of modernity. Thus, the Jewish reception of Darwinism may serve as an indicator of the extent to which the Jews in Russia were part of the modernization of Russian society. But the Darwinian concept of evolution of species through natural selection is considered incompatible with a teleological worldview, including a God-given plan for creation. This thesis addresses a twofold problem. One concerns the difficulties of reconciling Darwinism with Judaism and its traditional view of a God-given purpose in creation. The other problem is to explain the possible motives of the Jewish intellectuals for using Darwinian concepts such as the ‘struggle for existence’ in journal articles in the emerging Russian-Jewish press. The study employs discourse analysis, and the concept of isomorphism from institutional theory, for the examination of key concepts, citations, implied readers and purposes in a selection of journal articles from the Russian-Jewish press of the period 1860-1900. Contrasting with the lively general Russian debate on Darwinism, the results show that the Jews in Russia were rather reluctant to discuss Darwinism in the Russian-Jewish press. Censorship, other constraints and imminent problems facing the Jews, such as defence against growing anti-Semitism, are indicated as possible causes of the minimal evidence of a Jewish reception of Darwinism that was found. It was only to the extent that Darwinian concepts such as the ‘struggle for existence’ could be employed to address these more pressing issues that they were they found useful in a Jewish context. The results further imply that the integration between Russian and Jewish intellectuals during this period was weak, as reflected by the insignificant number of references to Russian sources in the selection of Jewish journal articles that were examined.

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