I got a question tonight at TDWG about the advantages of the Linked Data approach.

I described one of the main advantages in this blog post.

http://www.taxonconcept.org/taxonconcept-blog/2010/8/5/why-linked-open-data-...

As with the BHL example, it often makes more sense to link to related data curated maintained by a group which has that area as their primary concern.

The alternative is to spend resources replicating and curating data that is outside the main focus of your work.

A related benefit is that the value of both linked resources is enhanced.

I am not a biographer, and there are often very good articles about significant taxonomic authors on Wikipedia.

The value of both DBpedia and TaxonConcept are increased when I correctly link between a species concept and a DBpedia resource describing a taxon author.

For many of the taxa, you can go from a URI of a taxonomic author to lots of additional information related to the taxa he or she described.

Respectfully,

- Pete

---------------------------------------------------------------- Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 TaxonConcept Knowledge Base http://www.taxonconcept.org/ / GeoSpecies Knowledge Base http://lod.geospecies.org/ About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base http://about.geospecies.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------

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