Dear Gregor.
My initial reaction would be that RDF is great for data sharing, in fact it makes it easy because it comes with built in semantics so that applications can "know" which tags refer to what entities. One doesn't need to struggle with XML schema to figure out what is going on, and the use of standard vocabularies and URIs makes it easy to share widely (i.e., way beyond this community).
In the case of marking up taxonomic literature, I would use RDF for summary metadata (such as bibliographic details, lists of taxonomic names, etc.), but use XML to markup the document itself. The main reason for this is that in a document order matters, there is clear structure, and one could borrow existing efforts, such as the US NLM's DTD (http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov/publishing/1.1/journalpublishing.dtd), which is being adopted by Open Access journals such as PLoS and BMC. Indeed, I think the simplest strategy would be to add to this DTD, given that it defines a lot of the basic structure of a publication, and comes with additional tools (for examples, there are XSLT style sheets around to render this XML into something nice). Again, I fear there are a lot of wheels being reinvented.
Furthermore, if the goal of marking up taxonomic literature is to get to the point where taxonomic publications are produced with this markup in the first instance (i.e., not done after the fact), then you really want to use something that publishers use. For instance, why not add a taxonomic name module to the NLM DTD, and start an Open Access journal? OK, so there ar eother issues involved, but this would be a quick way to get there, rather than with a DTD/Schema that is unique to this community.
For SDD, well I'd be inclined to go for RDF, and keep it as lightweight as possible by referring to things like taxa, publications, images using URIs. My sense from looking at SDD is that it is enormously complex, partly because it tries to include far more information than it needs to (why does it need to know about people, telephone numbers(!), publications, etc. -- these can all be dealt with by other vocabularies and referred to by URIs). Why not have a core that covers what SDD is actually about?
Regards
Rod
On 27 Mar 2006, at 09:59, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
(Moving this from SDD list to Tdwg-tag list...)
Dear Roderic
many thanks for your answers.
triples in one table with three columns (subject, predicate, object). I guess for most people the issue is getting data out of RDBMS into RDF, not the other way around.
SDD and TaxMLit are about building tools for biology to create and share descriptive data, identification keys, online digital taxonomic monographs.
These are knowledge documents - intended to replace their printed equivalents. Many people hopefully will produce them and share (or even sell them) under various schemes - hopefully often under open licenses like cc.
Building these tools is a huge amount of work. The vision of SDD is not only to share data in a one-way street, but to share the work of applications by having specialized application that read data, do the thing they can best, write them back for the next app that does something else better. Ideally nothing should be lost in this process.
I realize that RDF is a good solution for the DiGIR kind of data advertisement, but is it good for data sharing?
Tools
As one who positively hates the diagrams XMLSpy produces I'm biased, but when I played with Altova SemanticWorks I was distinctly underwhelmed.
What can we use then? Is there any UML-tool (static class class diagram would be fine for a start) that automatically produces RDFS?
(I still do not understand whether RDFS attempts to cover the syntactical knowledge required for static class diagram - but other posts seem to imply this)
Gregor---------------------------------------------------------- Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn@bba.de) Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA) Königin-Luise-Str. 19 Tel: +49-30-8304-2220 14195 Berlin, Germany Fax: +49-30-8304-2203
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------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
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