[tdwg-content] More schema-last (was Monkey Business)

[Gregor Hagedorn]

> I stress "could"
> above, because I'm a little surprised it hasn't happened yet. There was
> movement in that direction at least as far back as 2005
> [http://dcpapers.dublincore.org/ojs/pubs/article/viewFile/808/804], and I
> heard the idea discussed back at the Montpellier VoCamp. I don't
> know if lack of progress here is because of lack of funding, or because
> the problem is a lot harder that it at first appears. I'd love to see a
> concerted effort in this direction,  starting modestly, focusing on a
> small taxonomic group for which there is already a lot of SDD instance
> data. (This would, IMHO, make a strong funding proposal.)

It is lack of funding and person resources. The SDD working group did
realize as far back as ca. 2000 (Noel Cross was the first to point
that out to me) that RDF is a match for SDD. However, it was really
difficult to grasp the implications at that time, we found rather than
making progress on the subject domain (build on DELTA and slightly
modernize it) we were hitting a wall.  So we purposely decided to stay
closer to object oriented modeling and map this to xml schema. It took
us 5 years to gather the necessary competence in xml schema to
finalize SDD, and when at the end of that period the leader of tdwg
made the decision that all needs to be re-done in RDF we were
exhausted and in fact almost all SDD core members were out of funding
for identification or descriptive work.

I welcome any intitiative to create an OWL-compatible form of the core
concepts of SDD - with or without my participation.

Gregor