[Tdwg-tag] RDF instead of xml schema

[Gregor Hagedorn]

(Moving this from SDD list to Tdwg-tag list...)

Dear Roderic

many thanks for your answers. 

> triples in one table with three columns (subject, predicate, object). I  
> guess for most people the issue is getting data out of RDBMS into RDF,  
> not the other way around.

SDD and TaxMLit are about building tools for biology to create and share 
descriptive data, identification keys, online digital taxonomic monographs.

These are knowledge documents - intended to replace their printed equivalents. 
Many people hopefully will produce them and share (or even sell them) under 
various schemes - hopefully often under open licenses like cc.

Building these tools is a huge amount of work. The vision of SDD is not only to 
share data in a one-way street, but to share the work of applications by having 
specialized application that read data, do the thing they can best, write them 
back for the next app that does something else better. Ideally nothing should 
be lost in this process.

I realize that RDF is a good solution for the DiGIR kind of data advertisement, 
but is it good for data sharing?

> Tools
> -------
> 
> As one who positively hates the diagrams XMLSpy produces I'm biased,  
> but when  I played with Altova SemanticWorks I was distinctly  
> underwhelmed.

What can we use then? Is there any UML-tool (static class class diagram would 
be fine for a start) that automatically produces RDFS? 

(I still do not understand whether RDFS attempts to cover the syntactical 
knowledge required for static class diagram - but other posts seem to imply 
this)

Gregor----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Königin-Luise-Str. 19           Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203