[tdwg-content] More Strange Monkey Business-like things in GBIF KOS Document

Hilmar Lapp hlapp at nescent.org
Mon Feb 14 19:11:57 CET 2011


On Feb 14, 2011, at 12:05 PM, joel sachs wrote:

> I think the recommendations are heavy on building ontologies, and  
> light on suggesting paths to linked data representations of instance  
> data.


Good observation. I can't speak for all of the authors, but in my  
experience building Linked Data representations is mostly a technical  
problem, and thus much easier compared to building soundly engineered,  
commonly agreed upon ontologies with deep domain knowledge capture.  
The latter is hard, because it requires overcoming a lot of social  
challenges.

As for the GBIF report, personally I think linked biodiversity data  
representations will come at about the same pace whether or not GBIF  
pushes on that front (though GBIF can help make those representations  
better by provisioning stable resolvable identifier services, URIs  
etc). There is a unique opportunity though for "neutral" organizations  
such as GBIF (or, in fact, TDWG), to significantly accelerate the  
development of sound ontologies by catalyzing the community  
engagement, coherence, and discourse that is necessary for them.

	-hilmar
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
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