I absolutely agree with Bob - we should always be encouraging reuse / linking / referencing of "external" Ids. Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 6:27 a.m. To: Steve Baskauf Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
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