On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 1:15 AM, Richard Pyle <deepreef@bishopmuseum.org> wrote:

This is mostly over my head, but I do have a more general question along these lines:

To what extent are we likely to be implementing substantive machine reasoning for Agents within the context of biodiversity informatics? I can see some value in terms of de-duplication of literature citations, and maybe a few other things here and there such as copyright ownership. But I take the absence of an Agent class within DwC as an indication that our community does not have as much a need for semantic reasoning for Agents (compared to, say, taxa and localities, among others).

If I'm missing something here, I'd very much like to be informed.

Aloha,

Rich

My words "be wary of" were chosen intentionally. I do not mean "do not use in any circumstances". The following are roughly true:

It's not that hard to come up with an arguably important use cases for reasoning on agents. For example, deciding whether two observation or specimen data records represent distinct or the same Occurrence can hinge---with enough agreement on other values---on deciding whether the observers are the same or different people. Herbarium duplicate sheets often suffer inconsistent misspellings of collector names due to data entry errors.

Including an intractable ontology in an otherwise tractable one can poison the latter.

[1] - [3] show that there are plenty of ways out of the current, not very deep, reasoning weaknesses that FOAF shares with many "OWL Full" ontologies. The risk is mainly in getting on board the wrong train of the many. For example, one way favors huge data but requires small class hierarchies, and another the reverse. It's not hard to imagine biodiversity data models that demand both large class hierarchies and large data. Homegrown hybrids might be possible, but then might require homegrown tools, etc. etc.

[3] is particularly interesting and probably readable with just a little exposure to formal ontologies, especially if you pretend that the acronyms and other stuff you don't understand don't matter very much to getting the big picture.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-profiles-20081202/#Introduction
[2] http://www.semanticoverflow.com/questions/1210/owl-full-and-reasoning
[3] Edward Thomas et al. Lightweight Reasoning and the Web of Data for Web Science, Web Science Conf. 2010, April 26-27, 2010, Raleigh, NC, USA http://journal.webscience.org/319/

Bob Morris

Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: morris.bob@gmail.com
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)

From: Bob Morris [mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2010 6:56 PM
To: Richard Pyle
Cc: Paul Murray; Steve Baskauf; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org

Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Comments on Cam's RDF practical details of recording a determination What is an Occurrence? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

If machine reasoning is a goal, I would be wary of FOAF. An OWL2-DL, or other OWL2 tractable reasoning profile, version remains a moving target, to the best of my knowledge. The reasons that http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ is not subject to tractable reasoning are relatively manageable, but I can no longer find the Zimmerman proposal for a FOAF DL version referenced in the thread ending at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Jul/0378.html

Can someone point me at a DL version of FOAF and indication that it is actively under discussion somewhere?

Thanks

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Richard Pyle <deepreef@bishopmuseum.org> wrote:

I was thoroughly delighted to learn recently that FOAF uses terms in almost
exactly the same way that I had structured my "Agents" data (right down to
the same exat terms, in most cases). I plan to move forward with the FOAF
terms that are relevant (thanks to John W. for pointing this out to me at
TDWG).

Rich

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org
> [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Paul Murray
> Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2010 4:18 PM
> To: Steve Baskauf
> Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org
> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Comments on Cam's RDF practical
> details of recording a determination What is an Occurrence?
> [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]
>
>
> On 29/10/2010, at 12:41 AM, Steve Baskauf wrote:
>
> > I think both dwc:recordedBy for the Occurrence and
> dcterms:created for some tokens should be provided.
> Depending on the situation, they might be different entities
> (I think John Wieczorek pointed this out in an earlier
> thread). dwc:recordedBy is specifically supposed to be a
> person whereas I think dcterms:creator could be a person or
> an institution.
>
> Perhaps it might be worthwhile leveraging the FOAF vocabulary
> (Friend of a Friend). It's mainly meant for social
> networking, but nevertheless it does contain terms such as
> Person, Organisation, Group and Project. (Project is
> interesting - collection activities perhaps are FOAF Projects).
>
> The spec is here: http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
>
> We can envisage the day where, by following links on
> taxonomic web pages, you could eventually find an Author's
> current twitter address, or ask the semantic web "find me all
> specimens of genus Tandanus collected by teams affiliated
> with the university of NSW between 2005 and 2007".
>
>
>
>
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--
Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: morris.bob@gmail.com
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)