[tdwg-tag] LsidVocs
Roger Hyam
roger at tdwg.org
Mon Jan 29 11:48:44 CET 2007
Hi Bob,
I presume you are referring to the work I am doing on the wiki:
http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/LsidVocs
This is currently pretty unstable which is why I have not been
shouting about it yet. The page is self explanatory but needs review
and a few minor changes for lessons learned so far.
If you would like to explore and have a play the TaxonName vocabulary
is the most stable and advanced.
Wiki Page: http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/TaxonNameLsidVoc
RDF/OWL vocabulary: http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonName
In a modern browser this is rendered as HTML human readable version
of the documentation but if you do view source or request it with an
application that doesn't honor the xslt instruction you will see the
actual XML serialized OWL. The XSLT used to generate the
documentation needs work - not least branding. If anyone would like
to help with this that would kind. The HTML rendering is used in the
Firefox LSID browser quite nicely as a kind of online help.
The other two links in the resources section of the wiki page point
to 1) an XML Schema that will generate XML documents that comply to
the OWL vocabulary 2) an example document.
The XML Schema is complex because the technology is a little
'challenged' when it comes to validating documents with multiple
namespaces. You need to have a separate schema for every namespace
which means that the TaxonName schema has 5 imports for starters and
one of those imports has a further import. Once you have the
framework for handling the things in place though it all becomes
possible and the user doesn't have to see it all.
Importantly you should currently use the schema from where it is
located. You can open it in OxygenXML and presumably in XML Spy from
its current location http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/xsd/TaxonName/
schema.xsd and browse around the schema. A downloadable version will
be done in the future if needed.
If you create a document based on this schema in Spy or Oxygen it
will work fine but the code will look terrible because they don't
seem to handle the namespace prefixing very well. This is one of the
reasons the template document is supplied. Download and use as the
template to mess with instance documents.
[caveat - the most common error with the template file is that I
haven't changed the schema location from local (in my dev
environment) to absolute. This is quite easy to correct and I'll put
some catch in there to stop me doing it soon]
Now the big caveat! The XML Schemas under voc/xsd are doomed to die
in the near future - so make the most of them. I have been working
with the TAPIR team on getting TAPIR to serve valid RDF based on
these XML Schemas and thanks the teams genius it seems to be working.
The significance of this is obvious as it can potentially join the
schema and semantic based worlds. One would theoretically be able to
request RDF from a provider who has only mapped ABCD 2.06 and doesn't
know anything about RDF. But I won't blow the trumpets and bang the
gong until it is really shown to work with real data and we are more
fully aware of any issues.
One known issue is that TAPIR providers don't support all of XML
Schema and don't like recursive structures. For this reason I am re-
engineering the schemas under voc/xsd and putting them under http://
rs.tdwg.org.uk/ontology/voc/tapir where they will continue to work as
advertised above. Other resources required for running TAPIR queries
(filters and concept alias' etc) will also be placed in this location.
There is a TAPIR developers workshop in 12 - 15 February (in romantic
Copenhagen for Valentine's day) that we are working towards. After
that workshop we will no doubt know more about how feasible the whole
strategy is and the file structure will become more stable.
We do our washing in public so you can see it all unfold on the
http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc space but unfortunately you can't get
directory listings. This is because we are using hash name spacing
and have to have a rewrite rule in there so that http://rs.tdwg.org/
ontology/voc/TaxonName#specificEpithet will resolve to the right
place (see W3C best practice document). Interesting files should be
linked to from the wiki or other files though.
This email is far longer than I intended but I hope it puts you in
the picture.
All the best,
Roger
On 27 Jan 2007, at 04:17, Bob Morris wrote:
> I'm eager to study these in detail. In the case of the XML-Schema
> representations, which I want to try to incorporate in several
> schemas, the import Schema Locations are relative and so it would
> be very helpful to have some kind of access to the actual schemas
> used in the imports. The most robust might be public read access to
> the SVN server holding these schemas.
>
> Bob
>
> --
> Robert A. Morris
> Professor of Computer Science
> UMASS-Boston
> http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
> phone (+1)617 287 6466
> _______________________________________________
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