[tdwg-tag] [BULK] TDWG ontology revisited ... a newcomer's perspective

[Gregor Hagedorn]

Unfortunately, I agree. I am trying to learn for years now the
vocabulary of the semantic web, reasoning, OWL, the difference of
modeling something as a subclass versus instances of a class, etc. By
now I can fake some knowledge, but the ontology technology is still so
much beyond me that I am unable to contribute much more than silence.
We have a big separation between people who find using Protege a
natural thing and people knowledgable in the domain, but bewildered by
the technology. This is no criticism of the ontology developers, who
were and are working very hard and indeed made things much easier to
look at than they started at.  And I am not suggesting going back.
Clearly TDWG when it jumped to the top of the technology stack had the
right direction (even though I believe, the wrong timing).

However, I would like suggest something from my experience: The only
time I have been using a semantic web tool in which I felt I could
contribute, spanning the gap between rich-text explanations and
precise RDF-based expressions, was the Semantic Media Wiki extension.

I would love to use this as a base much more than the
programmer-oriented tools that are currently used by the TDWG ontology
people.

Does anyone second me here?

Gregor

(PS The above does not claim that SDD as a plain old xml standard is
so much better documented....)