This is a little bit of a hack but it should work.
dwc:vernacularName dwc:vernacularName_en dwc:vernacularName_fr
The language variants are subproperties of the dwc:vernacularName
This would also avoid the somewhat awkward SPARQL queries needed when you want to query for "Name"@en and not "Name"@es
* For a more semantic web friendly version I was thinking of the following predicate hierarchy.
hasTaxonName hasAcceptedName hasOriginalName hasVernacularName = hasCommonName
The GNI URI forms would be
hasTaxonNameID hasAcceptedNameID hasOriginalNameID hasHeterochresonymID hasHeterotypicNameID hasHomotypicNameID hasOrthochresonymID
I have an example of this in the Knowledge Base.
It still has a bug in that the GNI URI's should have been replaced with their human readable skos:prefLabels as they are in URIburner and Sig.ma.
You can click through the related things in this KB view. bit.ly http://bit.ly/oz9pJC
http://lsd.taxonconcept.org/describe/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgni.globalnames.org%2...
Note how you can click between the links to the taxonomic authors etc, and the links to citebank.org web pages (not LOD RDF resources)
- Pete
On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 10:47 AM, joel sachs jsachs@csee.umbc.edu wrote:
Darwin Core is one of my favourite things. It's simple, elegant, and flexible. I wasn't there at design time, so I don't know if it was designed with the semantic web in mind, but it looks like it. It is, as John put it, primarily a collection of terms [and their definitions]. So if two people/agents use the same terms, they will share the same semantics. (This is why I think that a "more semantic Darwin Core" is not the appropriate goal for a Darwin Core/rdf working group.)
I'm concerned that there's so much confusion concerning DwC, since confusion is (typically) a barrier to adoption.
One source of confusion is Simple Darwin Core. A huge fraction of DwC records can be expressed as spreadsheets. Since *all* Simple DwC records can be expressed as spreadsheets, many people think
Simple Darwin Core = spreadsheet-expressible Darwin Core
(which isn't true). This means that if they want to express their data as a spreadsheet, they think they need to conform to Simple Darwin Core.
The requirement of Simple Darwin Core is that there be no repeated elements. But the requirement for spreadsheet-expressible Darwin Core is that there be no repeated nested elements. I previously argued (http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/2011-January/002220.html) in favour of using subscripts to represent elements in repeated nests (thereby permitting their use in spreadsheets). Even if we don't permit that, I'm not sure that the benefits of maintaing a separate Simple Darwin Core standard, in addition to the regular Darwin Core standard, are greater than the costs in terms of giving people wrong ideas. (I prefer the presentation at http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/guides/xml/index.htm, where Simple DwC is presented as simply one of several XML schemas for Darwin Core.)
I *think* I see the motivation for Simple DwC. Suppose X wants to use Darwin Core, but doesn't know much about databases, and just wants to put all his data in a spreadsheet. He might not know what a repeated, nested data structure is. So it's easiest to just say to him "don't repeat any elements, and you'll be fine - your records will be spreadsheet-expressible". I agree that that's a benefit. Are there others?
Thanks - Joel.
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