On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The other thing I'm wondering about the values of dwc:biome would be how a user would indicate the controlled vocabulary one is using. The ENVO ontology is mentioned. Under the scenario of the draft RDF guide, the term dwcuri:biome would have a URI value of http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ENVO_01000195. That would be unambiguous. However, if dwc:biome is reserved for literal values (as the RDF guide suggests it should be) then how does a machine know that "flooded grassland biome" is a label from ENVO and not a literal description of a biome from the Whittaker, Walter, Bailey, etc. systems which are probably currently in much wider use than ENVO and therefore likely controlled vocabularies of choice for many users?
A machine will have no way to know from which vocabulary a value for a property comes unless the value says so. That is common to all terms that recommend a controlled vocabulary, but do not enforce it. It would be no different for dwc:biome. The only way to be unambiguous is to provide an unambiguous value, which, as you noted, http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ENVO_01000195 is.