[Tdwg-guid] Species Photo markup idea, request for comments

[Pete DeVries]

Hi TDWG's,

I am doing a talk at my undergraduate Alma mater Lawrence University
(http://www.lawrence.edu) and I was hoping to get the undergraduates
excited about contributing their species observations to the Semantic
Web.

One idea I was thinking about proposing is that they add the location
and collection data including the WGS-84 long and lat to their photos
of specimens as part of the EXIF data.

To tie the data to a specific taxon, they would also add the uBio
nameBank LSID of
the lowest level taxonomic concept they are able to identify the specimen too.

That maybe a specific family or it maybe all the way to Genus and species.

Then they post the image on a web site that is accessible to search engines.

I thought that this might be a easy way to increase the semantic datasphere,
as well as increase the availability of species observation records.

* Also I am thinking about suggesting they create a foaf and the tie
the FOAF uri
  to their image.

What are people's thoughts on this idea?

The student's might misidentify something, but if the geo data is
correct someone
else maybe able to re-tag the image to the appropriate taxonomic group. Or
even more interesting, there may be a voting scheme of tags as to what group
the species belongs to.

Thanks in Advance :-)

- Pete

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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
Email: pdevries at wisc.edu
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