Peter DeVries wrote:
I
also don't seem to understand why if someone can find some missing
utility in existing vocabularies, and mints one starting with txn, it
is seen by some as an act of heresy, while the minting a new vocabulary
starting with dsw is not.
Heretical
enough to be written out of the sacred scrolls?
Nobody else has come right out and said this, but I'm going to go ahead
and say it because I really don't think the paranoia contributes to
this discussion. It isn't exactly clear to me who you think is the
TDWG Illuminati is. You made the statement "TDWG Illuminati
determined
that indeed the current DarwinCore was not good for the
semantic web and formed a group to create one" and I asked you what
group you were talking about. You did not answer that question. Given
the statement below I assume you think it includes me. I have already
told you that nobody in TDWG or anywhere else asked or suggested to Cam
Webb and I that we develop Darwin-SW. Cam (whom I've never actually
met in person) suggested to me that we give it a try and we did. Thus
far I have not yet heard anyone, including me, suggest that it was
heresy for you to create the txn ontology. Likewise, I have not heard
anyone officially associated with TDWG give any kind of "blessing" to
dsw. Actually, the fact that no one has come out on the list and said
that some aspect of dsw was heresy doesn't actually mean that people
aren't thinking that it is. I was kind of expecting that somebody
might.
It really borders on humorous that you suggest that I'm somehow a part
of some TDWG conspiracy. I have been to precisely one TDWG meeting and
with one exception, that is the only time I've ever personally met
anybody who regularly contributes to this list. That one exception is
Nico Cellinese, whom I've met on one other occasion. In fact, the
person whom I talked to the most at the meeting (other than Alexey
Zinovjev who came with me to the meeting and was also a TDWG newcomer)
was actually YOU. I'm also pretty sure that the only person other than
Nico who regularly contributes to this list that I've ever interacted
with in any sort of collaborative way is Bob Morris on the Live Plant
Image Group, and he as been largely silent in this discussion.
Actually, he did make one comment about dsw and I would characterize it
as cautionary. That hardly qualifies as a conspiracy to promote DSW.
If you would care to notice, DSW is not my first attempt at writing
RDF. My first attempt was the examples in my Biodiversity Informatics
paper (https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jbi/article/view/3664) and
quite frankly, at this point I think those examples were not very
good. There were several actual mistakes that I made and I think that
the overall approach that I was taking in modeling Occurrences was
flawed. If it turns out that people in the TDWG community find
themselves agreeing with the DSW model (which I do not consider a
certainty), it would not be because of a conspiracy. It would be
because I've probably spent dozens of hours (maybe even hundreds of
hours) reading and trying to understand the points of view expressed by
people in this community on the tdwg-content list and in papers and web
posts that they've created. With the exception of the
IndividualOrganism class (which I'll take some credit for promoting)
pretty much everything that I contributed to DSW were ideas that I've
absorbed from the TDWG community, which were then molded by Cam's
contributions to the collaboration. If you will recall, last November
Rich Pyle and I had what I suppose could be considered a somewhat
bruising exchange on the list about the scope of the Individual class.
Although I did not agree with him at the time, I learned a lot from
that exchange and in retrospect, I can see that his opinion was not
wrong, it was just framed by the desire to meet different objectives
with the class. Cam and I actually attempted (in a somewhat feeble
way) to incorporate Rich's perspective in the "alternative version" of
DSW.
So my point is that if you want to promote the taxonconcept.org
ontology as an ontology for general use by the community (which is
certainly your right), then you need to be willing to subject it to
critical analysis by the people you want to use it. When you get
criticism, you need to see that as an opportunity to improve your work,
not as a conspiracy to destroy it. Cam and I have requested a critical
analysis of DSW from the community and I don't really think we've
gotten enough of it yet to suit me. If DSW has flaws (as it most
certainly does), we will try to address those flaws and learn from the
experience. All you are going to accomplish by promoting a conspiracy
theory is to cause people to not take you seriously. That would be a
shame because you have a lot of great ideas and have some of the most
experience in the TDWG community at actually implementing LOD "in the
wild". You should take the fact that I took the time to wade through
the taxonconcept.org RDF to try to understand it and subject it to
critical analysis as a compliment, not a threat. I have already
acknowledged that a lot of what I know about RDF are things that I
learned from looking at your examples.
Steve
--
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
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