[tdwg-tag] class design, generalization, L(O)D

[Jim Croft]

I would have to agree Stan.  For all its faults TDWG has produced
standards that were/are useful.

The Australia's Virtual Herbarium would not have been possible without
the efforts and products of TDWG and the herbarium community still
rusns on this.  The Online Catalog of Australian Museums and the Atlas
of Living Australia extended this nationally and GBIF and EoL are
doing the same thing globally.

The standards may be incomplete, maybe flaky, they may not even work,
but they provide the foundation of communications and we are much
better off with slightly borked standards than with none at all.

But the criticism of TDWG sitting a bit awkwardly and self-contained
in the wider standards framework is a valid one and something we are
working to address.  I have always assumed this is one of the guiding
principles of TDWG.

I prefer the analogy of motivating jelly tpo to stay nailed to the wall.  :)

jim

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Blum, Stan <SBlum at calacademy.org> wrote:
> On 11/15/10 11:19 AM, "Peter DeVries" <pete.devries at gmail.com> wrote:
> [ ... ]
>
> So in addition to failing to work within the standards of the larger
> informatics community TDWG*, is failing to demonstrate that it has a
> working, useful standard.
>
> [...]
>
> DarwinCore is not the only thing TDWG has done, but the DarwinCore is
> explicitly based on Dublin Core, both in content and in the DCMI approach to
> maintenance.  More over, every TDWG effort in the last decade has been based
> on some kind of widely used internet standard (XML schema, for example).
>  Are those not part of the larger informatics community?
>
> The second part of the statement is a very narrow opinion.   GBIF provides
> access to more than 200 million organism occurrence records gathered from
> hundreds of providers, all using TDWG standards.  Not working, not useful?
>  Only if your definition of useful includes the qualifier “with semantic web
> technologies.”  Yes, within the semantic web domain, we don’t have anything
> useful or working.
>
> I think the point of this discussion is to determine what demonstrations and
> supporting specifications would be appropriate and feasible in the near
> term.   Then we need motivation for a herd of cats.
>
> -Stan
>
>
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>



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