Comments inline
Mikel Egaña Aranguren wrote:
I see, so dsw:IndividualOrganism should do for populations. I'm asking cause I have some biodiversity data that perhaps I will publish as Linked Data (Depending on the funding :-) and the data always follow the taxon-population pattern, having for each taxon many populations. I would like to use dsw as vocabulary, most probably extending it to accomodate further concepts like Situation (At risk, etc.)
I think that I would be correct in saying that it was our intention that DSW not be any more restrictive than necessary to provide clarity about the types (i.e. rdf:type) of resources and how classes are related to each other (by means of the object properties we defined to specify the relationships among classes). In that sense DSW would "allow" a population to be typed as an IndividualOrganism. Whether that is a good idea or not I guess would be up to you. The one issue that comes to my mind is whether you might at some time intend to define smaller units that are subsets of your populations (e.g. subpopulations or actual individual organisms). I think you could do that in the same way that you could have a single dsw:IndividualOrganism instance represent a whole organism and pieces of it that were specimens or tissue samples. This independence of scale of an "Individual" was an idea that Rich Pyle talked about in some of his posts in November. We tried to deal with it through the separation of the somewhat abstract dsw:IndividualOrganism class (representing the relationship between the entity and the Occurrence and Identification classes) from the dsw:Token class that can represent the actual physical "thing" itself (a preserved specimen, living specimen, tissue sample, etc.) all of which can be connected to the same IndividualOrganism instance by the dsw:derivedFrom property. You might be able to do something like that with populations, subpopulations, individual organisms, etc. But we haven't tried modeling that up to this point. Some of the diagrams on the http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/TokenIssues might be analogous to that.
In the spirit of Linked Data, there wouldn't be anything that would prevent you from assigning to populations other properties that were outside of DSW and Darwin Core, or that you defined yourself, such as a hasSituation property or something like that.
I did not state in my first email that DSW is essentially a draft intended to foster discussion (such as this). We make no claims that it is or should be "THE" ontology. Cam and I needed something functional for our projects, so we just made DSW to serve that purpose.
Thanks again for the comment/suggestion!
Have you considered including this ontology in Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (http://www.obofoundry.org/)?
At this point, I think that DSW needs to be played with (or shot at??) quite a bit more before we'd post it as a "mature" ontology. Cam and I have played with it enough to know that it will validate and can be read by Linked Data browsers. It works as a way to give people access to metadata when they try to resolve HTTP URI guids. But does it actually "do" everything people want an a "Semantic Web" sense? I really don't know. It hasn't been put in a triple store, tested with SPARQL queries, etc. yet.
Steve