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Comments inline<br>
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Mikel Egaña Aranguren wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4DB97B26.90609@fi.upm.es" type="cite">
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I see, so dsw:IndividualOrganism should do for populations. I'm asking
cause I have some biodiversity data that perhaps I will publish as
Linked Data (Depending on the funding :-) and the data always follow
the taxon-population pattern, having for each taxon many populations. I
would like to use dsw as vocabulary, most probably extending it to
accomodate further concepts like Situation (At risk, etc.)<br>
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I think that I would be correct in saying that it was our intention
that DSW not be any more restrictive than necessary to provide clarity
about the types (i.e. rdf:type) of resources and how classes are
related to each other (by means of the object properties we defined to
specify the relationships among classes). In that sense DSW would
"allow" a population to be typed as an IndividualOrganism. Whether
that is a good idea or not I guess would be up to you. The one issue
that comes to my mind is whether you might at some time intend to
define smaller units that are subsets of your populations (e.g.
subpopulations or actual individual organisms). I think you could do
that in the same way that you could have a single
dsw:IndividualOrganism instance represent a whole organism and pieces
of it that were specimens or tissue samples. This independence of
scale of an "Individual" was an idea that Rich Pyle talked about in
some of his posts in November. We tried to deal with it through the
separation of the somewhat abstract dsw:IndividualOrganism class
(representing the relationship between the entity and the Occurrence
and Identification classes) from the dsw:Token class that can represent
the actual physical "thing" itself (a preserved specimen, living
specimen, tissue sample, etc.) all of which can be connected to the
same IndividualOrganism instance by the dsw:derivedFrom property. You
might be able to do something like that with populations,
subpopulations, individual organisms, etc. But we haven't tried
modeling that up to this point. Some of the diagrams on the
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/TokenIssues">http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/TokenIssues</a> might be analogous
to that. <br>
<br>
In the spirit of Linked Data, there wouldn't be anything that would
prevent you from assigning to populations other properties that were
outside of DSW and Darwin Core, or that you defined yourself, such as a
hasSituation property or something like that. <br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DB97B26.90609@fi.upm.es" type="cite"> <br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DB96E9D.8010403@vanderbilt.edu" type="cite"> <br>
I did not state in my first email that DSW is essentially a draft
intended to foster discussion (such as this). We make no claims that
it is or should be "THE" ontology. Cam and I needed something
functional for our projects, so we just made DSW to serve that
purpose. <br>
<br>
Thanks again for the comment/suggestion!<br>
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<br>
Have you considered including this ontology in Open Biological and
Biomedical Ontologies (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.obofoundry.org/">http://www.obofoundry.org/</a>)?<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
At this point, I think that DSW needs to be played with (or shot at??)
quite a bit more before we'd post it as a "mature" ontology. Cam and I
have played with it enough to know that it will validate and can be
read by Linked Data browsers. It works as a way to give people access
to metadata when they try to resolve HTTP URI guids. But does it
actually "do" everything people want an a "Semantic Web" sense? I
really don't know. It hasn't been put in a triple store, tested with
SPARQL queries, etc. yet.<br>
<br>
Steve<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address:
VU Station B 351634
Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address:
2125 Stevenson Center
1161 21st Ave., S.
Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center
phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu">http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu</a>
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