I am starting to see some reasons why there might be a need for an more XML type version of the DarwinCore and a separate, still undefined buy truly &quot;semantic&quot;, version that still need to be worked out.<div><br></div>
<div>Part of this is that I think it that most people don&#39;t understand the semantic issues and will not for sometime.</div><div><br></div><div>So for those who are submitting their data to GBIF, I don&#39;t know if they have to understand all the somewhat counterintuitive semantic issues.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Here is an example from one of our earlier discussions - I realized only later that I should have brought this up at the time.</div><div><br></div><div>For XML using &quot;scientificName&quot; makes a lot of sense.</div>
<div><br></div><div>However:</div><div><br></div><div>1) The current semantic web cannot have literals as subjects.</div><div><br></div><div> 2) Also if you represent knowledge as triples without ontology-based inferencing, you need to define predicates that for both &quot;directions&quot; in a particular relationship. (In general)</div>
<div><br></div><div>So if we had a URI for each scientific name we would need to make both of the following kinds of statements.</div><div><br></div><div>&lt;concept&gt; <b>hasScientificNameURI</b>      &lt;name_uri&gt;</div>
<div>&lt;name_uri&gt; <b>isScientificNameURI_Of</b>  &lt;concept&gt;</div><div><br></div><div>In the LOD cloud, you cannot assume that everyone will load and be able to infer against your specific vocabulary.</div><div><br>
</div><div>This is, in part, the result of vocabularies not always playing well together.</div><div><br></div><div>Also, it is not clear to what extent inferencing will work well on really large data sets or for particular projects.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Eventually this will get figured out, but for now we need predicates that can be used to represent both directions. (most of the time)</div><div><br></div><div>Without them you can only query in one direction.</div>
<div><br></div><div>This was not completely obvious to me until I had a test set and realized why I was not able to query it in the ways I wanted.</div><div><br></div><div>So for the more XML-centric DarwinCore there is no problem with using <b>scientificName.</b></div>
<div><br></div><div>For the fully semantic web version, the following pattern might be easiest to clearly interpret.</div><div><br></div><div>hasScientificName &quot;Puma concolor (Linnaeus 1771)&quot;</div><div>hasScientificNameURI &lt;<a href="http://gni.globalnames.org/name_strings/6c3dc35f-d901-5cc5-b9c8-ad241069b9f8">http://gni.globalnames.org/name_strings/6c3dc35f-d901-5cc5-b9c8-ad241069b9f8</a>&gt;</div>
<div><br></div><div>This makes it clear that the first form is to be used for a literal while the second form is to be used for a conventionally resolvable URI.</div><div><br></div><div>Why do we need these name URI&#39;s at all? </div>
<div><br></div><div>Because some groups will need to relate name strings to each other and name strings to concepts etc.</div><div><br></div><div>Hard to do when you can&#39;t use a literal as a subject. :-)</div><div><br>
</div><div>Respectfully,</div><div><br></div><div>- Pete<br>----------------------------------------------------------------<br>Pete DeVries<br>Department of Entomology<br>University of Wisconsin - Madison<br>445 Russell Laboratories<br>
1630 Linden Drive<br>Madison, WI 53706<br><a href="http://www.taxonconcept.org/" target="_blank">TaxonConcept Knowledge Base</a> / <a href="http://lod.geospecies.org/" target="_blank">GeoSpecies Knowledge Base</a><br><a href="http://about.geospecies.org/" target="_blank">About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base</a><br>
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