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<BODY style="MARGIN: 4px 4px 1px; FONT: 10pt Microsoft Sans Serif">Good points. I wonder if TDWG-TAG will be the place for this larger, conceptual discussion?<BR><BR>>>> "Gregor Hagedorn" <G.Hagedorn@BBA.DE> 15-Feb-2006 7:51:45 AM >>><BR>> One comment following from the GUID meeting is that I believe we need to get<BR>> serious about being able to represent our data models in RDF. This means<BR>> that the goal should indeed be for a "flat" (Darwin Core like) standard. If<BR>> there are elements which hold nested complexity that we wish to represent,<BR>> we should recognise that these are probably separate data objects which<BR>> should be modeled as separable components (with their own "flat" standards).<BR>> The top level object can then have a property whose value is the identifier<BR>> for one of the lower level components. Even if we choose to compose rich<BR>> documents with entire trees of object relationships, the underlying model<BR>> should make these separations clear.<BR><BR>I am concerned about this, to me it seems to block the way into a future for <BR>scientific data exchange.<BR><BR>Flat list is great for advertising, (see e.g. DublinCore, DarwinCore or RSS), <BR>but not really for exchanging complex data.<BR><BR>Completely forbidding any object aggregation would mean that each measurement <BR>of a specimen has a stand-alone resource... Or each author in a publication <BR>(because authors have addresses, so they can not be just a list, the list <BR>elements have structure).<BR><BR>Where can we discuss this issue which goes far beyond the TDWG-LIT?<BR><BR>Gregor----------------------------------------------------------<BR>Gregor Hagedorn <U><A href="mailto:(G.Hagedorn@bba.de">(G.Hagedorn@bba.de</A></U> )<BR>Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety<BR>Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)<BR>Königin-Luise-Str. 19 Tel: +49-30-8304-2220<BR>14195 Berlin, Germany Fax: +49-30-8304-2203<BR><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>TDWG-Lit mailing list<BR><U><A href="mailto:TDWG-Lit@lists.tdwg.org">TDWG-Lit@lists.tdwg.org</A></U> <BR><U><A href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-lit_lists.tdwg.org">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-lit_lists.tdwg.org</A></U> <BR></BODY></HTML>