On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 8:00 PM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Sticking my head up with a few suggestions
- (Social) I've only been a lurker in this historically long thread
since all my formal Biology training came from Mr. Siegler at Red Bank, NJ High School in 1957. But I have noticed that dwc:establishmentMeans sounds like something for which I recall that the Invasive Species informatics community requires a fairly fine-grained vocabulary. Yet I've only noticed one participant (Jerry Cooper) who I recognize travels in that community. (But I don't know all the participants). TDWG in general, but perhaps not this list in particular, has increasingly strong connections to the Invasive Species world, but their use-cases will still need to be aggressively sought.
- (Technical). The conversation often has words like "attribute"
"class" and RDF in the same sentence. In my experience, when people begin to formalize this constellation using the RDF stack, the first thing they do is translate ER-like diagrams into triples that look, for example, like dwc:establishmentMeans rdfs:domain dwc:Individual IMO, this should not be done lightly, because in rdf it would entail that should someone choose to apply dwc:establishmentMeans to, say a pqr:Population object P, then that pqr:Population P would necessarily be a dwc:Individual, which sounds naughty to me. It may well be that the intent is that dwc:establishmentMeans is meant to apply only to Individuals (though in my naiveté that would surprise me) but such decisions should not be taken lightly if there is any desire to have RDF as a basis for logical reasoning about Life, the Universe, and Everything---or at least about Life. Informal narrative like "move dwc:establishmentMeans to the proposed Individual class" could dig itself into the rdfs:domain hole...
It was exactly this observation that resulted in the removal of all rdfs:domain assignments in the Darwin Core as we have it today. Even without the domain assignments, I have trouble reconciling dwc:establishmentMeans as a property that describes an Individual. Instead seems to me a relationship between the Individual and an Event happening at a Location. An example that sends me down this line of reasoning is a rhino calf taken from the wild, an Event where the dwc:establishmentMeans would be 'wild', and placed in a zoo, where the dwc:establishmentMeans for the same Individual would be 'captive'.
--Bob Morris
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
Well, I also feel pretty good about most of that diagram, but I'm still struggling with the whole "token" thing. I feel the need to discuss basisOfRecord=LivingSpecimen which is the most complicated case and is
also
related to the previous discussion about dwc:establishmentMeans as well
as
my proposal to move it to the proposed Individual class. It is also
related
to another issue that I haven't broached here but which is discussed in
my
paper - "Occurrences" that aren't directly derived from an individual.
I'm
beginning to think that part of what I wrote there (in the paper) was
wrong,
but I'm not sure what the alternative is. That issue will probably come
up
if I comment about what Cam wrote in his email. So there may be more to hash out, but I can't handle it today because I've got too many other
things
to do. I've been mentally composing what I hope is a lucid presentation, but it hasn't hit the keyboard yet.
Steve
I have to say, this has been about the most productive (if volumunous) list-discussion I've had in...well...maybe ever. It seems we've both
been
equally persuasive, and equally willing to concede. How rare that
happens
in an internet forum! I'm not sure there's anything left that we disagee about. If the "diagram1" seems to resonate with everyone as the most "normalized" ER diagram we'll likely ever need, and if we can somehow accommodate flexibility in RDF for collapsing attributes to different classes (but only from the "one" side to the "many" side) -- then we
might
have achived the elusive Holy Grail of biodiversity informatics: true consensus.
Thanks for your great feedback and for challenging my statements. I need
that!
Likewise!
Aloha, Rich
.
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
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-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile) _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content