[tdwg-tag] [BULK] TDWG ontology revisited ... a newcomer's perspective
Roderic Page
r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Thu May 14 18:47:40 CEST 2009
Gregor somewhat overstates my mastery of Semantic Mediawiki (SMW), but
it is a useful tool to play with these ideas. You can embed RDF
vocabularies, and display these for the propellor heads like us (who
get an unnatural degree of pleasure from this sort of thing), or hide
them behind nice forms for entering and editing data.
For example, here's an example:
http://itaxon.org/wikidev/Doi:10.1071/ZO9780789
This is a paper that describes some Australian nematodes, and the page
is linked to the paper's author, the journal, and the taxonomic names.
One thing advantage that SMW has that I think is very cool is that,
because of its templates, you can effectively program it by writing
wiki pages (unlike a CMS such as Drupal, where you have to hack the
underlying code). This makes it very powerful, as well as easy to
document (each vocabulary element has a wiki page, where you can
specify what it means).
So, two thoughts:
1. I've been arguing recently that decent progress in the field
requires massive aggregation coupled with good tools for editing.
Editing requires version control. We also need to be open to users
creating unexpected content/annotations. We also want to have a tool
that can make inferences (i.e., the sort of thing databases make
trivial).
To my mind, once you think of open-ended, versioned editing, you are
thinking of a wiki.
2. I doubt the OWL inference/reasoning stuff will ever fly on the
scale we need. Keep stuff very simple. We can gain a great deal simply
from joining the dots.
Regards
Rod
On 14 May 2009, at 10:19, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
> Greg wrote:
>> priority. Somewhere between Roger's lsid vocabularies and the MRTG
>> schema page there must be a way to achieve this.
>>
>> Is Semantic-mediawiki an option?
>
> :-) :-) :-)
>
> I should say the MRTG stuff is a very pragmatic way to go beyond
> Word or Excel.
>
> With some effort, you can give each class, each property a page. In
> Semantic Media Wiki this make sense, since the corresponding RDF is
> directly exposed. You would then have to make overview pages (bringing
> the separate pages into a synthesis view). I know how to do this with
> the DPL extension, but it is very laborious which is why we did not
> use it in MRTG. I guess SMW has good tools, but while I master
> mediawiki, I don't master SMW yet. Roderic Page does though :-)
>
> Gregor
> _______________________________________________
> tdwg-tag mailing list
> tdwg-tag at lists.tdwg.org
> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
>
---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
DEEB, FBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
More information about the tdwg-tag
mailing list