[tdwg-tapir] Darwin & RDF

[Renato De Giovanni]

Dear all,

This is clearly a crosscutting issue and I thought about using the 
TAPIR mailing list for the following reasons:

1) The main people involved with DarwinCore are subscribed here;
2) This issue raised from a TAPIR use case;
3) It can affect all existing TAPIR/DarwinCore providers, as well as 
all output models based on DarwinCore.

As you know, there was a recent release of TapirLink which includes 
an LSID authority that serves an RDF representation of DarwinCore by 
default.

Everything seems to be working fine, but when I parse the resulting 
RDF in the W3C validator, I see that the predicates are being 
displayed as: 

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwcoreGenus

While in the semantic world the "expected" representation would be 
something like:

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwcore#Genus

Apparently it seems just a cosmetic thing, but after some quick 
research this "unexpected representation" can cause problems 
depending on usage and tools: for instance, if it's necessary to 
perform RDF/XML round-tripping, then semantic web tools may not work 
if there's no clear separation between the namespace URI and local 
names, which is normally done by using the fragment identifier.

If you're interested, you can find a similar discussion here:
http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg16476.html

Which has this interesting follow-up:
http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg16480.html

Since the new DarwinCore version and its extensions are not yet a 
TDWG standard and may even be subject to other changes, I'm proposing 
to add the fragment identifier to all Darwin namespaces. Better to do 
this as soon as possible if we're going to need this in the future.

Please let me know if you have any comments, ideas or concerns...

It may be the case that this change will affect other things (like 
the new GBIF REST service) although probably not as much as 
TAPIR/DarwinCore providers which will need to re-map their databases.

Best Regards,
--
Renato