Hi Joel,

I see schema last as part of an iterative process in which you mark things up as you think they will work and revise the data and ontology until it allows the kinds of queries etc. that you want.

The current Darwin Core maps to spreadsheets and XML but I think that we might want to work on some representation that works well on the LOD.

This form could be created by cleaning and normalizing DarwinCore submissions.

- Pete

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:05 PM, joel sachs <jsachs@csee.umbc.edu> wrote:
Paul,

Is that Organism#hasIdentification URI from the TDWG ontology? I thought
the TDWG ontology was de facto deprecated. Am I wrong about that?

Not only does
http://tdwg.org/voc/Organism#hasIdentification
not dereference, but it doesn't even generate real hits via Google. (Even
http://tdwg.org/voc is broken.)

My thoughts about hasIdentification are in the context of representing
Darwin Core as rdf. I think it's important that we continue to allow (and
encourage) spreadsheet represntations of DwC, and that these map naturally
to de-normalized rdf.

I agree that it makes sense, as you suggest, to define hasIdentification
as a property without domain constraints, and then introduce subProperties
individualHasIdentification, occurrenceHasIdentification,
pictureHasIdentification, etc., each with the appropriate domain. Then,
applications that know what they're doing can apply the correct property.

You wrote: "a person who uses that predicate to describe a
painting is misusing the vocabulary and deserves what they get."

The problem is that it's not just the person who misuses a vocabulary that
gets a mess of incorrect inferences. We all do.

Joel.


On Tue, 22 Feb 2011, Paul Murray wrote:

>
> On 20/02/2011, at 1:24 PM, joel sachs wrote:
>
>> I'm currently arguing  with  someone off-list about what I think is my
>> minimal example, that I hope that everyone can agree on. It's about domain
>> constraints on "hasIdentification". If I say
>>
>> "http://fu.bar hasIdentifcation rabbit",
>>
>> should we, as a community, interpret that to mean that http://fu.bar is an
>> individulOrganism (as opposed to, say, a picture)? Must I, as a guy who
>> likes to make assertions, be told either
>
> been a while since I chimed in on this list.
>
> hasIdentification has an RDF namespace. If the full name of the predicate is actually
>
>       http://tdwg.org/voc/Organism#hasIdentification
>
> Then it's probably quite reasonable to make the type assumption. If you want to make it more general, then define a more general predicate
>
>       http://tdwg.org/voc/Common#hasIdentification
>
> and type (IdentifiableThing), and make subclass/subproperty assertions. If the namespace/ontoogy that you are importing makes it clear that we are talking about organisms, then a person who uses that predicate to describe a painting is misusing the vocabulary and deserves what they get.
>
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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
TaxonConcept Knowledge Base / GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
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