I know that there is some scepticism about RDF, so I thought I'd relate an experience I had yesterday at The Natural History Museum in London. A colleague of mine has often complained about how hard it is to get his data (and data others have) into a useful form for the web, and that efforts such as the Semantic Web only seem to make this harder.
So, as an experiment, I attempted to get some information about an ant image into a local triple store. This involved putting some triples in a table using EditGrid (an online spreadsheet), grabbing the XML, converting it to RDF, and importing that into the triple store. See here for details: http://semant.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-triples-using-editgrid.html.
The bottom line is that it was trivially easy to go from a spreadsheet to a triple store, and hence add new information about this ant. Writing it up in the blog took as long as the actual work.
This particular example concerns one image harvested from the web. Things like adding distribution records in bulk would be even easier.
So, my question is this: is there anything other than RDF that can make this as straightforward as it is? If so, I'd love to hear it...
Regards
Rod
------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html iChat: aim://rodpage1962 reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com