On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Kevin Richards <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:RichardsK@landcareresearch.co.nz" target="_blank">RichardsK@landcareresearch.co.nz</a>></span> wrote:<br>> Not
sure if this has been mentioned as I have struggled to keep up with
this thread, but it sounds to me like the benefit of the Individual
class/properties is to be able > to link together various web resources
that refer to data obtained from the same individual in some manner, so
we probably need terms that allow the description of > how these
individuals, or parts of individuals relate to each other. The Scope
idea will help, but maybe there is a need for terms like
"partOfIndividual",<br>> "derivedFromIndividual"?<br><br>Now you're talkin Kevin! Actually, now you're talking about ontology, and I plead: Go slow, develop use cases; develop competency questions; develop tools. I note that Steve was careful to separate the question of adding terms to the normative, representation free, DwC, from the problem(s) of making an RDF representation of same: <br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Steve Baskauf <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu" target="_blank">steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu</a>></span> wrote:
> <br>> I am pleased with the significant and thoughtful
discussion
that has taken place on the tdwg-content email list<br>> regarding the
relationships
among Occurrences, <br>> Individuals, and other entities that are a part of
the
community's thinking about biodiversity metadata<br>> and the way that those
metadata are structured.<span> [...]</span><span> </span>I
feel that > would be critical for<br>>facilitating the ultimate development of a recommendation for the
representation of Darwin Core as RDF.<span></span><div bgcolor="#ffffff">> [...]</div></div><br><br>This separation is important, because what use one intends to make of an RDF representation has a lot of bearing on what "gotcha's" one has to take care about. <br>
<br>
For example, if there is a desire to exploit formal semantics available for RDF stack ---which will probably emerge as a requirement once one starts talking about relations between properties---then different surprises will emerge from the pitfalls if one "merely" wishes to put SKOS relations on the properties and reason about the SKOS instead of the science. But I guess, for example, that Miranker's Morphster project [1] will benefit most in its current use cases, from good mereological ontologies for descriptive data, not just stuff like "more general than".<br>
<br>There are surprises even in the simplest use of RDFS and formalisms about classes. I've previously whined about premature assignment of rdfs:domain while conceding (did I???) that it can sometimes make a designer's intention clearer to humans. Perhaps more startling is that type assignment automatically "creates" an rdfs:class if one was not already available, due to the formal semantics of rdf:type [3]. Thus, in an earlier posting, Paul Murray has (unintentionally?) introduced a new class apni:TaxonName in 33407.rdf [2] via <br>
<rdf:type rdf:resource="<a href="http://biodiversity.org.au/voc/apni/APNI#TaxonName" target="_blank">http://biodiversity.org.au/voc/apni/APNI#TaxonName</a>"/><br><br>Then there is the question of adequate tools for the desired style of ontology architecture. The OWL community's important tools are not friendly even to DublinCore, whose style is(?) what DwC follows. (Steve Baskauf has complained to me in private email that the Manchester validators don't seem to even check rdfs vocabulary correctly; Paul complained that Protege4 makes a big mishmash of Properties when importing DwC. (Both of these are probably false positives in cases of insufficient typing of properties themselves, and the OWL community probably doesn't care about the origin or utility of such weak typing [4]. )<br>
<br>So the hard part is yet to come. But I agree with you. It is quite appealing.<br><br>Bob Morris<br><br>Robert A. Morris<br>Emeritus Professor of Computer Science<br>UMASS-Boston<br>100 Morrissey Blvd<br>Boston, MA 02125-3390<br>
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria<br>
email: <a href="mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com" target="_blank">morris.bob@gmail.com</a><br>web: <a href="http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/" target="_blank">http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/</a><br>web: <a href="http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush" target="_blank">http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush</a><br>
<a href="http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram" target="_blank">http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram</a><br>phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)<br><br>[1] <a href="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7Emiranker/studentWeb/MorphsterHomePage.html" target="_blank">http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~miranker/studentWeb/MorphsterHomePage.html</a><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">[2] <a href="http://biodiversity.org.au/apni.name/33407.rdf" target="_blank">http://biodiversity.org.au/apni.name/33407.rdf</a> <br>
[3] <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_type" target="_blank">http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_type</a><br><div>[4] <a href="https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/p4-feedback/2009-October/002448.html" target="_blank">https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/p4-feedback/2009-October/002448.html</a><br>
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