<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Bob,<div><br></div><div>I guess I was looking specific examples. Imagine you are selling this to someone who hasn't drunk the Kool Aid regarding RDF and the Semantic Web -- or worse, did drink, survived, and is now an ex addict ;)</div><div><br></div><div>Within our field (broadly defined), for example, I can see XML being useful to exchange semi-structured data (the NLM DTD for publications, Darwin Core for specimens, RSS feeds from journals, etc.). These are concrete examples that one could point to (although XML is hard to love, and is probably overused - JSON is what the kewl kids are using <a href="http://stereolambda.com/2010/03/19/why-is-json-so-popular-developers-want-out-of-the-syntax-business/">http://stereolambda.com/2010/03/19/why-is-json-so-popular-developers-want-out-of-the-syntax-business/</a> ).</div><div><br></div><div>So, where are our actual success stories...?</div><div><br></div><div>Regards</div><div><br></div><div>Rod</div><div><br><div><div>On 20 Sep 2011, at 11:14, Bob Morris wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>How would you answer your question about<br><br>1. XML<br>2. XML validated by XML-Schema<br>3. CSV<br>4. ASCII dumps of relational data<br><br>If there is an answer, X, for one of those, an answer to your<br>challenge will, often, be that RDF accomplishes things like X but<br>without difficult D, for various values of D.<br><br>It's also arguable, that the formal semantics available to the RDF<br>stack and other ontology-based data representation schemes, allows the<br>building hypothesis testing software, sometimes more easily than, for<br>example, data mining. The biomedical community has been doing that for<br>30 years or more. Most other sciences are just now getting with the<br>program.<br><br><br>On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:40 AM, Roderic Page <<a href="mailto:r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk">r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote type="cite">It's morning and the coffee hasn't quite kicked in yet, but reading through<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">recent TDWG TAG posts, and mindful of the upcoming meeting in New Orleans<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"> (which sadly I won't be attending) I'm seeing a mismatch between the amount<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of effort being expended on discussions of vocabularies, ontologies, etc.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">and the concrete results we can point to.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Hence, a challenge:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">"What new things have we learnt about biodiversity by converting<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">biodiversity data into RDF?"<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">I'm not saying we can't learn new things, I'm simply asking what have we<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">learnt so far?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Since around 2006 we have had literally millions of triples in the wild<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">(uBio, ION, Index Fungorum, IPNI, Catalogue of Life, more recently<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Biodiversity Collections Index, Atlas of Living Australia, World Register of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Marine Species, etc.), most of these using the same vocabulary. What new<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">inferences have we made?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Let's make the challenge more concrete. Load all these data sources into a<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">triple store (subchallenge - is this actually possible?). Perhaps add other<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">RDF sources (DBpedia, Bio2RDF, CrossRef). What novel inferences can we make?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">I may, of course, simply be in "grumpy old arse" mode, but we have millions<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of triples in the wild and nothing to show for it. I hope I'm not alone in<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">wondering why...<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Regards<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Rod<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">---------------------------------------------------------<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Roderic Page<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Professor of Taxonomy<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Graham Kerr Building<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">University of Glasgow<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Email: <a href="mailto:r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk">r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Tel: +44 141 330 4778<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Fax: +44 141 330 2792<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">AIM: <a href="mailto:rodpage1962@aim.com">rodpage1962@aim.com</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Facebook: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192">http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/rdmpage">http://twitter.com/rdmpage</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Blog: <a href="http://iphylo.blogspot.com">http://iphylo.blogspot.com</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Home page: <a href="http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html">http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">_______________________________________________<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">tdwg-tag mailing list<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="mailto:tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org">tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><br><br><br>-- <br>Robert A. Morris<br><br>Emeritus Professor of Computer Science<br>UMASS-Boston<br>100 Morrissey Blvd<br>Boston, MA 02125-3390<br>IT Staff<br>Filtered Push Project<br>Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology<br>Harvard University<br><br><br>email: <a href="mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com">morris.bob@gmail.com</a><br>web: <a href="http://efg.cs.umb.edu/">http://efg.cs.umb.edu/</a><br>web: <a href="http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush">http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush</a><br><a href="http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram">http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram</a><br>phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)<br><br></div></blockquote></div><br><div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; ">---------------------------------------------------------<br>Roderic Page<br>Professor of Taxonomy<br>Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine<br>College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences<br>Graham Kerr Building<br>University of Glasgow<br>Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK<br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk">r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk</a><br>Tel: +44 141 330 4778<br>Fax: +44 141 330 2792<br>AIM: <a href="mailto:rodpage1962@aim.com">rodpage1962@aim.com</a><br>Facebook: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192">http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192</a><br>Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/rdmpage">http://twitter.com/rdmpage</a><br>Blog: <a href="http://iphylo.blogspot.com">http://iphylo.blogspot.com</a><br>Home page: <a href="http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html">http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html</a><br></span>
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