Dear Joel,
I guess part of the problem with surveys is that they require people to do work without any immediately obvious benefit to them.
Couldn't many of the questions here be tackled simply by looking at the RDF people are pumping out, given that it's essentially self-describing?
For example, harvest a record from each of the major RDF users (uBio, ION, IPNI, Index Fungorum, ZooBank, CoL, WoRMS, ALA, UniProt, etc.) and:
1. build list of vocabularies used
2. list shared vocabularies
3. look for any shared identifiers
Then the task is to discover what is unique to a particular project, and what vocabularies are used for the same things (why oh why do we have two different sets of vocabularies for taxonomic names, for example?).
My recent grumbles about RDF mainly concern the lack of shared identifiers, which is harder to assess because you need to look at a multiple records. But my guess is that very few RDF providers reuse other providers' identifiers. People who aggregate may well end up using lots of identifiers to cope with this, but ideally we'd want taxonomic concept databases (e.g., CoL) to use nomenclator identifiers for names (e.g., ION, ZooBank, IPNI, Index Fungorum), and existing identifiers for literature (e.g., DOIs, PubMed). So, the question is, how connected is the biodiversity data web? (not very, is the short answer). It shouldn't be too hard to quantify this, and identify what needs to be done to fix the problem (for example, what links could we add to make the biodiversity data cloud coalesce more rapidly?).
What we're seeing outside biodiversity is the growth of services that say identifier x is the same as identifier y (e.g.,
http://sameas.org/ and
http://identifiers.org/), which reflects the adage that there's no problem in computer science that can't be solved by adding a layer of indirection. t I'd argue that this is symptomatic of a failure of to reuse identifiers -- which one could also argue is a natural consequence of the way the we use the web, but that' s another argument ;)
Regards
Rod
On 16 Nov 2011, at 04:18, joel sachs wrote:
Hi Everyone,
One of the action items out of the kick-off meeting of the new RDF/OWL
best practices group was a questionnaire with two purposes: i) to assess
people's expectations and wishes for the group; and ii) to serve as an RDF
audit, a partial "state of the semantic web in TDWG".
The questionnaire is at
http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/SurveyAll are encouraged to participate (especially the 20 or so people who
volunteered to do so at the kick-off).
Filling out the survey myself, I realized that it can actually take a lot
of time to present and explain an organization's rdf . So please, don't be
shy about answering in parts. Take ten minutes to provide some
pointers now, and then return later to provide more detailed explanations.
For the first ten people to complete the survey, I will buy beer at
iEvoBio 2012 (or whenever I next see you).
Thanks!
Joel.
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