Hilmar Lapp wrote:
I suppose someone could mint terms if they cared about this.
Certainly not - minting random terms whose semantic content
consists solely of a non-resolving URI string or a string in whatever
natural language is barely better than providing no value at all.
Well, I wasn't thinking of just any "somebody" creating random terms
with non-dereferencing URIs. I was thinking about using the new GBIF
terms management capabilities which I think is probably intended to
(among other things) host controlled vocabularies. Also, I was
assuming SKOS or some other well-known mechanism for expressing
relationships would be used to describe the
controlled-value-URI-identified resources.
Yes, indeed. If they don't exist yet, ask that they do. That's
the way to build community ontologies - by a community actively working
to make the ontology what it needs it to be.
Well, the problem here is that there is only one ENVO ontology. There
are many systems for defining what a biome is (see wikipedia for
examples). Data producers will use the biome system they believe in
and are already using, and that won't necessarily be the one system
that ENVO comes up with. We can't legislate that everyone use ENVO.
So create controlled vocabularies for the various extant systems and
use SKOS or something like that to describe how they are related so
that a machine can understand the relationships.
Steve
--
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
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