Hi Renato, Bob and all,
I am a new to this thread and I have not been able to go through it all, but as some of you already know, for the IABIN Species and Specimens Thematic Network we will be setting up TAPIR providers with information on Species structured with the Plinian Core (www.pliniancore.org). The first providers will hopefully be ready by mid-year... our datasource (~4K Species records), will hopefully be on-line in the next month...
Additionally, I would really like to try coding some of the information from our Timber Tree Species from the Flora of Costa Rica to set up the TDM on top of that, particularly looking for those that do not map well.
I promise to write back next week,
William Ulate Coordinator Biodiversity Informatics Unit Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad, INBio.
P.S.: Where can I find the minutes/results of the Workshop?
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: Viernes, 04 de Mayo de 2007 11:17 a.m. To: Renato De Giovanni Cc: Benjamin Clark; Andreas Kohlbecker; tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org; Éamonn Ó Tuama Subject: [tdwg-tag] Re: TDM Ontology
Renato De Giovanni wrote:
Anyway, I'm not quite familiar with species-level data sources. From the previous messages, it seems that the main reason for using the generic tagging approach is that most data sources will have chunks of text including information about one or more TDM categories, and it will be impractical to separate this information in a more structured way. Did I understand the problem correctly?
Yes, but it is worse. Many such sources have \both/ textual---but categorized---data and structured data. And both may need ontological mapping so that both machine integration and human display applications have a chance of putting together the right stuff and also not ignoring what the client wishes not be ignored.
In this case, then you're right that it would be interesting if someone could investigate this a bit more, make some tests and give us a more practical feedback. If most participants of the species model workshop have this kind of database, maybe they could try to map their fields to the TDM categories.
I am presently doing some of that, albeit first trying to hand code some instances with Protege and Altova SemanticWorks. I guess the interesting part will come for stuff that \doesn't/ map well. At the moment, I am somewhat at a loss for what our intent was in this case, but maybe in another few hours I will have figured that out. ...
Bob
Best Regards,
Renato