What’s in a name? : Sense and Reference in biodiversity information

\"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'.

“纵使我们将玫瑰换作其他名号，其芬芳依旧馥郁。”莎士比亚借朱丽叶之口对罗密欧言道，名称不过是约定俗成的无意义符号，真正重要的是所指涉的对象本身——也就是那本身拥有甜美香气的“事物”。弗雷格在其经典论文《论意义与指称》（Über Sinn und Bedeutung）中对此并不全然认同，他主张名称即便缺乏已知的指称，其本身也可具备内在意义。而后期维特根斯坦在《哲学研究》（Philosophical Investigations，简称PI）中似乎否认了名称的绝对任意性，反对脱离语境探寻意义：他指出我们无法仅凭随意发出的声响，便真正意指诸如“门”这类事物。正如货币无法脱离其可购买的奶牛而存在一般（《哲学研究》第120节），词汇也无法与其意义割裂开来。

尤为值得关注的是，生物分类群的科学名称通常会描述该生物或物种本身所具有的属性。与之相对，在语义网技术与关联开放数据（Linked Open Data，简称LOD）领域，整体趋势是以网络链接或统一资源标识符（Uniform Resource Identifiers，简称URI）的形式，用指称对象替代名称，其口号便是“彰显事物，而非字符串”。但即便近期一篇论文已详尽阐述了“使用名称关联数字化生物多样性信息所面临的诸多挑战”，我们能否真正实现用统一资源标识符替换生物分类群的科学名称？这样的做法是否可取？抑或是仅仅识别同一生物的不同名称变体之间的等价关系——这些变体拥有相同的指称对象，再通过sameAs(URI)属性将它们关联至同一“事物”，便已足够？

全球名称架构（Global Names Architecture，简称GNA）现已推出科学名称解析器，可完成此类工作：将黑松（Pinus thunbergii）这类生物的名称，与来自生命百科全书（Encyclopedia of Life，简称EOL）、uBio名称库等其他数据源的全局标识符及统一资源标识符进行关联。不过，即便我们拥有一套虽不完全连贯但属于“自然语言”的科学名称体系，将其转换为语义网本体仍存在其他挑战，而近期已有研究者通过所谓的“词汇桥梁”（lexical bridges）提出了部分解决方案。