I think this could be interesting for the GUID part of the meeting.

Cheers.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Roderic Page <r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk>
Date: 20 de marzo de 2007 15:14:43 GMT+01:00
To: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org, tdwg-guid@lists.tdwg.org
Cc: Simon Rycroft <simon@rycroft.name>, Vince Smith <vincent.smith@nhm.ac.uk>, David Remsen <dremsen@gbif.org>, Donat Agosti <agosti@amnh.org>, William Piel <william.piel@yale.edu>
Subject: [tdwg-tag] BioGUID

Dear All,

I've put together a web site called http://bioguid.info which, rather grandly, is an attempt to bootstrap the biodiversity Semantic Web by providing resolvable URIs for biological objects, such as publications, taxonomic names, nucleotide sequences, and specimens.

These URIs (or "GUIDs") can be resolved by a web browser to display HTML, but under the hood are resolved to RDF (which you can see by viewing the source of the web page you get for a URI).

The web interface is really window dressing, I just wanted a way to display RDF that wouldn't frighten people (me included). For some URIs all I do is grab XML and reformat it (e.g., DOIs). For GenBank records, all manner of agony is involved in trying to extract specimen and publication links.

A good place to get a sense of what bioguid.info is about is to start with this Pubmed record: http://bioguid.info/pmid:17079492

From this, you can get a list of sequences. If you click on one of those, you'll see a link to a specimen, which you can then look at (you'll need Firefox 1.5, Camino, Webkkit, or a browser with a SVG plugin for the full effect).

What I'm hoping to do is start doing things like taking a TreeBASE record, getting the linked sequences, running these through bioguid.info to extract georeferenced specimen links, so with minimal effort we get a map (and eventually a Google Earth tree a la Bill Piel).

The glue to make this happen comprises HTTP URIs that are dereferenceable to RDF. This is my mantra for the day.

Regards

Rod




----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

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