[tdwg-content] domains of object properties. was Re: DwC for the semantic web

[Bob Morris]

I´ve been in Ecuador for two weeks with only a few hours of internet
contact. Flying from Quite tonight.  So I´ve only scanned the Design
Document and may have done so too hastily.  I´ll have more time next
week to look at it and the ontology.  However, meanwhile, I´ve posted
the following unsurprizing comment there, and hope that anyone who
responds here will also respond there.
-----
It´s a little hard to understand why DSW object properteries should
have domains but data properties should not. Keep in mind that the
formal semantics of rdfs:domain is that if rdfs:domain P C then any
use a P x forces a to have rdfs:type C. This constrains the
extensibility of P and probably of the use of other ontologies where P
might be useful. Specifying domains tends to close the world somewhat,
and I see no advantage to that....Indeed, this is more naughty than
anti'naughty sensu Bob Morris.
-----

--Bob Morris

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 9:01 PM, Steve Baskauf
<steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> With the exciting development of Semantic Web technologies, many of us already need a way to consistently express DwC in RDF.  In particular, we need it to meet the requirements for GUID resolution (as expressed in the TDWG applicability guide) and to be able to share and aggregate diverse kinds of biodiversity metadata in the Linked Open Data world.
>
> After several months of development, stimulated by the tdwg-content discussions of last Fall, we would like to offer an
> ontology for consideration, based on Darwin Core terms:
>
>   Darwin-SW:
>     General site: http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/
>     Using namespace dsw = "http://purl.org/dsw/"
>
> It is a candidate for general usage, but we do not claim it is _the_ solution, and greatly respect the efforts by others to develop similar ontologies, from which we have learned much. However, for DSW, we wanted to use existing DwC terms for classes and data properties whenever possible and only create new terms when there were no existing terms that would do the job.  We did feel that there was a need for clarity in how resources should be typed (i.e. rdf:type property) and for object properties that expressed the relationships among classes unambiguously. Please see the Rationale, DesignPrinciples and ClassesAndTypes wiki pages at the above address.
>
> In the ontology, we sought to embody relationships among classes based on our perception of the community consensus of what the classes represent and how they are related to each other, as expressed in posts to the tdwg-content list.  Thus each class is documented carefully on the wiki with hyperlinked references to specific tdwg-content posts. We also sought
> to clarify or resolve issues that were raised in the list discussion, most notably the relationship among Occurrences and the evidence that documents them (i.e. tokens), and the role of "individuals".  See wiki pages for the Token, Occurrence, and IndividualOrganism classes.
>
> The ontology is now in use at http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/, and we intend to use it more widely.  We would value your opinions on the fitness of this ontology as a general solution for consistently expressing DwC concepts in RDF.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Steve Baskauf and Cam Webb
> steve.baskauf at Vanderbilt.Edu
> cwebb at oeb.harvard.edu
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
>
>



-- 
Robert A. Morris

Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
IT Staff
Filtered Push Project
Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University


email: morris.bob at gmail.com
web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)