[tdwg-content] Unintentionally introducing classes. [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Paul Murray]

> 
> Anybody can do that, so how do we certify metadata sources as "trusted" in our community?  The state of the LOD cloud at the moment reminds me of the early days of email and the Web, when it was reasonably "safe" to assume that users' intentions were good.  Then came viruses, trojans, phishing scams, etc.  If those kinds of things had been considered at the start of email and the Web and considered in its design, it would have been easier to prevent (or reduce) the evolution of nefarious uses of the Web.  Perhaps we should be thinking about that more now when we are in the early stages of designing for the "semantic web".

"The cloud" is never going to be a consistent ontology (it only takes one person asserting "A is not A" ). When you ask a reasoner to reason, you always give it a limited set of triples that you trust for its axioms. I haven't looked into it yet in any detail, but I think that this is the role of SPARQL - it becomes possible to say "using the reasoning rules *here* and *here*, reason over all the triples served up at at biodiversity.org.au and zoobank.org". The other alternative is "importing" all of the individual URIs at biodiversity.org.au, which is obviously infeasible.

> There has been the suggestion made by several people that we need a second kind of Darwin Core, an RDF recommendation that will allow for deep semantic reasoning.

I don't think you need an entirely different DwC. What will serve the purpose is a auxiliary vocabulary document. A separate document with OWL rules about the DwC predicates, which you can choose to import and reason over. Those rules don't need to be in the document defining the vocabulary. Perhaps more than one ruleset.



------
If you have received this transmission in error please notify us immediately by return e-mail and delete all copies. If this e-mail or any attachments have been sent to you in error, that error does not constitute waiver of any confidentiality, privilege or copyright in respect of information in the e-mail or attachments. 



Please consider the environment before printing this email.

------