Dear all,

I just have finished a TCS XML  demo page at:
http://taxonconcept.stratigraphy.net/taxon_tcs?taxid=793
which is a TCS representation of synonym list (concepts) data on the taxon 'Subbotina patagonica' published by Berggren & Norris (1997) and Pearson et al. (2006), see a html output here:
http://taxonconcept.stratigraphy.net/taxon_details?taxid=793

The XML valdates against the schema, but of course, what I have implemented is a 'interpretation' of the standard, e.g. I have now summarized the two synonymies to one DataSet, and I am not sure if this granularity makes sense. So I would like to ask you to check if the output looks reasonable.

I was really happy to see how good TCS fits to my data and after I have seen the first results I realized how good this fits to an experiment I was trying some months ago:

I tried to apply the Google PageRank algorithm to synonymies and as a first attempt I calculated what I called TaxonRank. I have provided some more info on this here:
http://stratigraphynet.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-taxonrank-works.html (+ my geoinformatics community prepared a special volume on ontologies etc and I have also submitted a paper to Computers&Geosciences which will be published soon).

After seeing the TCS XML output and reading many RDF and ontology related mailing list contributions I wonder if anybody has ever thought about doing something like this before?
My tests are on synonymy list (concepts) only, but I think similar approaches could lead to interesting results also if applied to e.g. genetics. And..wouldn't be ranking based on such ontologies a killer application for GUIDs?
apologies for cross posting..

Robert
--
Dr. Robert Huber,

WDC-MARE / PANGAEA - www.pangaea.de
Stratigraphy.net - www.stratigraphy.net
_____________________________________________
MARUM - Institute for Marine Environmental Sciences (location)
University Bremen
Leobener Strasse
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e-mail rhuber@wdc-mare.org