Hi Pete,
Yes, I know - and you are among the MANY people to whom I owe some follow-up work (my inbox of unanswered email has crept up past the 8,000 mark). But I entered this fray in part to re-kindle that conversation we had started months ago. That notwithstanding, I don't remember an answer to the question I posed just now, concerning taxonconcept.org as a concept store. I had been under the impression that it would establish C. fisheri s.s. and C. fisheri s.l. as two distinct Concepts, with two distinct GUIDs, and a mapping of relationships between them and with other entities (e.g., cross-referencing specimens, nomenclature, TaxonNameUsage instances, etc.) The thing that caught my attention in your recent email was the notion that one would need to leave taxonconcept.org to see alternative concept definitions.
Aloha,
Rich
From: Peter DeVries [mailto:pete.devries@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2011 12:25 PM To: Richard Pyle Cc: Nico Cellinese; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Fwd: [Fwd: Re: If you need something for referring to a population, then it is probably best to do it as a related class]
Hi RIch,
These were the very issue that we had talked about modeling last fall and I thought we were planning to work on after the holidays.
Check your old email I have your prototype fish list.
Perhaps SKOS:narrower?
http://lod.taxonconcept.org/Pomacanthidae.html
Respectfully,
- Pete
On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Richard Pyle deepreef@bishopmuseum.org wrote:
Alas, I don't have time to dive-in to this conversation in full (I still owe too many things to too many people), though I have been very tempted!
Very quickly:
The model supports links to alternative concepts. The uniprot and bio2rdf,
and DBpedia
URI's can be considered closely related concepts. The way this works ideally is that the identifier of this insect (from
TDWG) makes the assertion that
this
observation http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/0da685c9-9cdc-4dff-baf3-38d1bdbc http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/0da685c9-9cdc-4dff-baf3-38d1bdbc%0d%0a6552. html 6552.html
represents an instance of this
concept http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/z9oqP#Species
But if I understand you correctly, alternate concepts don't exist within taxonconcept.org; but only as links to other repositories of concepts, that may or may not be congruent with those represented in taxonconcept.org. If that's the case, then what happens when the person who identifies the observation [http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/0da685c9-9cdc-4dff-baf3-38d1bdbc6552.html] doesn't agree with the concept represented in [http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/z9oqP#Species] -- or any other concept represented in taxonconcept.org? Do they have to hunt around through the other repositories to find the right one?
Let me give an example. The type specimen of Centropyge fisheri was collected in Hawaii (e.g., http://pbs.bishopmuseum.org/images/JER/detail.asp?ID=-1377454029 ). The type specimen of C. flavicauda was collected in the South China Sea, and is known throughout the rest of the tropical Pacific (e.g., http://pbs.bishopmuseum.org/images/JER/detail.asp?ID=-1339602635).
Many taxonomists have treated these two species as distinct and valid; and hence two separate taxon concepts representing populations in Hawaii, and in the broader Pacific, respectively. Other taxonomists have considered them to be conspecific, and thus only one species throughout the tropical Pacific, including Hawaii. The name "fisheri" has priority, so the concept labeled as "Centropyge fisheri, sensu stricto" refers to the species concept consisting of individuals from Hawaii, and the concept labeled as "Centropyge fisheri, sensu lato" refers to the species concept consisting of individuals throughout the tropical Pacific (including Hawaii).
If I understand you correctly, there would be only one of these two concepts represented in taxonconcept.org. For the sake of argument, let's say it was the sensu lato concept (which is the more modern interpretation, lumping the two historically distinct species). What if someone made an observation in Johnston Atoll, and they are a splitter (i.e. recognizing Hawaii C. fisheri as a distinct species from Pacific C. flavicauda), and wanted to identify their specimen to the concept that *excludes* the Hawaii population (i.e., C. flavicauda)? Would they be able to do so? Or would they have to look through uniprot and bio2rdf, DBpedia, etc. to find a species-level concept that matches the one they want to represent the observation as?
Apologies if I have completely misunderstood this conversation...but at the very least, perhaps a concrete example (with pictures!) might help to disambiguate some of this thread.
Aloha, Rich