I have updated my earlier revision of the TDWG BioBlitz RDF.

I commend Joel for his RDF and think that any suboptimality was because of problems in trying to use the existing Darwin Core as Linked Data.

Some earlier issues that have been fixed in the new examples are:

1) The names for people were not standardized. Even as a text string you could not find who collected what.
    To fix this I created URI's for all the individuals involved and linked the occurrences to the URI for the person that made the observation

2) The names for species were not standardized or spell checked.
    It took a while but I was able to figure out what I think people "meant" by the various name and linked them to species concepts.
    For those occurrences with multiple identifications, I linked the last identification to the occurrences species concept.
    *Future BioBlitz's might benefit from a pick list at least to genus.

3) Virtuoso out of the box does not recognize "associatedMedia" as an image that can be displayed. In order to get these to show up on the map view I had to add each image as a foaf:depiction.
    Also associatedMedia is a bit vague and this should probably be broken into different media types like images, sounds etc.

4) In my other RDF representations I make statement about the geonames locations in which the species concept was observed so the continent, state and county have "expectationsOf" the species and the species is "expectedIn" those areas. I have added these statements to the example RDF so that both the locations and the species concepts are linked to the occurrences.

5) I added in my proposed "area" so that it is easy to see what species were observed near each other. Since there was no measure of radius in these longitude and latitudes I made the radius 100 meters.
    Normally I would estimate the radius for a GPS reading to be within 10 meters but some of these observations were made where the GPS reading was taken and the readings were given only to two decimals.

Area = long, lat; radius in meters following the ietf proposal but with the precision of the long and lat standardized example "geo:41.53000000,-70.67000000;u=100"

The example data are available at the following URL's

Occurrences: http://lod.taxonconcept.org/tdwg2010bioblitz/TechnoBioblitzOccurrences_dates.rdf


People: http://lod.taxonconcept.org/people/tdwg2010bioblitz.rdf


This bit.ly link will show clickable map with all the occurrences. (It is a little slow to load)


The actual URL is < http://lsd.taxonconcept.org/isparql/view/?query=DESCRIBE%20%3Fx%20WHERE%20%7B%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%0A%20%20%3Fx%20%3Chttp://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns%23type%3E%20%3Chttp://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/%23Occurrence%3E.%0A%7D%0A&endpoint=/sparql&resultview=map&maxrows= >

But I don't expect that will go through everyone's emails correctly.

This Pivot view shows occurrences by investigator  http://bit.ly/eW3fgm

Here is are view of two of the records, note how you can browse between people, species concepts, identifications, areas etc.

http://lsd.taxonconcept.org/describe/?url=http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~jsachs/occurrences/tdwg2010bioblitz_5

http://lsd.taxonconcept.org/describe/?url=http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~jsachs/occurrences/tdwg2010bioblitz_2603

Here is a browsable view of one of the areas bit.ly  http://bit.ly/hBtVFL

  http://lsd.taxonconcept.org/describe/?url=geo:41.53000000,-70.67000000;u%3D100

Here is the view of the species concept for the Honey Bee that is now linked to these occurrence records.

http://bit.ly/g1zzJC

In summary, I think it make sense to follow LOD best practices because this maximizes the utility of the data and allows you to take advantage of all the available tools.

Respectfully,

- Pete
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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
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