The resolvability of ontological terms is needed by services like Sindice to figure out how to interpret the RDF.
As in this example:
Like Bob, I have also had problems incorporating the TDWG vocabulary into Protege, which is one reason that I had trouble getting it to work. My current thinking is that it might be best to keep the TDWG vocabulary as it is for submitting data to GBIF etc, while designing a more efficient vocabulary that works well on the LOD.
By "efficient", I mean a vocabulary that uses standard resolvable URI's instead of literals for standard terms etc. This solution would also avoid the problem that Markus just mentioned.
I am also wondering if the "individual" definition should be changed to mean one individual organism rather than a potential collection of individuals. Individuals from the same colony could be represented using a separate related vocabulary. Allowing multiple
individuals will cause problems for consuming applications. For instance, is the queen a separate individual or not? How do you differentiate between a photo of the queen vs. a photo of one of the workers. There are also potential problems even if the individuals
are all workers.
I have been thinking that for some attributes like character states, it might be best to have a family level ontology. In this example, you might have a "formicidae_ontology", that could be used to deal with individuals from the same colony as well as ant specific character states.
This could be defined as a subproperty of dc:relation or something similar in the gbif/tdwg vocabulary.