Dear Joel and Steve,
I am very interested to take part in the RDF/OWL task group kickoff meeting at TDWG 2011 in New Orleans!
I have recently started as the new Knowledge Systems Engineer at the GBIF secretariat in Copenhagen. I plan to focus in the first phase on providing tools for collecting terminology and the definition of concepts in use in the biodiversity informatics domain. This will hopefully lead to the mapping of terms in these vocabularies and the development of ontologies to describe the relation and different use of these terms in different parts of our community.
GBIF provides the http://vocabularies.gbif.org as a tool to collect and discuss vocabularies. This tool was developed at GBIF and the Natural History Museum in London using the Scratchpads and Drupal. I am exploring other supplementary tools such as the Web Protege for collaborative development of domain vocabularies and ontologies. I am also exploring solutions such as the NCBO BioPortal for publishing agreed-upon versions of our vocabularies and ontologies. I would much appreciate feedback and discussions to identify the requirements, priorities and solutions for this task.
My personal background is from the community of plant genetic resources for agriculture where I have taken an active part in the genebank domain modeling during the last 10 years.
With best regards Dag Endresen
On Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:46:44 -0400 (EDT), joel sachs wrote:
Greetings everyone,
After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.
Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).
When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)
In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.
Many thanks! Joel.
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