As one of the co-conveners of the proposed RDF task group, I suppose it may be part of my job to "fall on the grenade". Actually, I may not be the best person to respond to the issues that Rod brought up, being somewhat of a Semantic Web skeptic myself. However, I think that the question that Rod posed actually contains an incorrect assumption, namely that anybody actually HAS converted much of any biodiversity data into RDF. If by "biodiversity data" one means "taxon names", "taxa", or perhaps "taxon name uses", then yes, there are millions of triples in the wild. But to my thinking, that's taxonomy data, not biodiversity data. I'm not familiar with all of the organizations Rod listed, but with the exception of BCI which is focused on institutions, I think most of them deal primarily with taxonomic names and relationships, not occurrences, identifications, organisms, specimens, events, etc. which I would consider to be major components of biodiversity data. I certainly don't think that there is any existing "common vocabulary" that has been used to describe those kinds of things, otherwise why would we have just spent the last two years discussing what they mean and how they are related to each other?

So I would say that one reason why we haven't "learned" much so far is because we don't have either the raw materials (aggregated metadata about occurrences and all the other stuff I mentioned) nor the vocabulary to describe them (yet). Getting those things (or figuring out how to get them) is one of the points of forming the proposed task group. If it turns out that after a year we've done nothing but spun our wheels with nothing to show for it, then maybe the venture is futile. But I would like to make the attempt first before we reach that conclusion.

Steve

Roderic Page wrote:

It's morning and the coffee hasn't quite kicked in yet, but reading through recent TDWG TAG posts, and mindful of the upcoming meeting in New Orleans (which sadly I won't be attending) I'm seeing a mismatch between the amount of effort being expended on discussions of vocabularies, ontologies, etc. and the concrete results we can point to.

Hence, a challenge:

"What new things have we learnt about biodiversity by converting biodiversity data into RDF?"

I'm not saying we can't learn new things, I'm simply asking what have we learnt so far?

Since around 2006 we have had literally millions of triples in the wild (uBio, ION, Index Fungorum, IPNI, Catalogue of Life, more recently Biodiversity Collections Index, Atlas of Living Australia, World Register of Marine Species, etc.), most of these using the same vocabulary. What new inferences have we made?

Let's make the challenge more concrete. Load all these data sources into a triple store (subchallenge - is this actually possible?). Perhaps add other RDF sources (DBpedia, Bio2RDF, CrossRef). What novel inferences can we make?

I may, of course, simply be in "grumpy old arse" mode, but we have millions of triples in the wild and nothing to show for it. I hope I'm not alone in wondering why...

Regards

Rod

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
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