Hi Roger and everyone else involved in DwC and the core ontology,
in preparation for the upcoming hackathon [1] here we've worked our way through a number of use-cases for attaching metadata to data elements in NeXML [2] in a way that is semantically defined. The results are here:
http://evoinfo.nescent.org/Database_Interop_Hackathon/Metadata_Support
If you can take a critical look specifically at the section on 'Specimens within collections' (http://tinyurl.com/djdby3) that'd be great.
Specific questions related to that: 1) Is this using DarwinCore in a correct and/or sanctioned way?
2) Is there a TDWG vocabulary (in RDF or OWL) that has a relation for referring to a specimen record, or are you aware of another one that has this?
3) I could only find the XML schema for DarwinCore. Are there any plans for (or did I miss the existence of) a corresponding ontology defined in OWL or RDF, similar Dublin Core (which has a RDF ontology at http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1 and DCterms ontology at http://purl.org/dc/terms) .
4) It wasn't immediately clear how one would use the TDWG core ontology for doing the same thing in RDF (or OWL) - is this ontology supposed to be used yet, and are there usage examples, or does someone have a recommendation for how one would write the same example using the core ontology?
I know it's a rather tiny subset of DwC that we're using here but that's only a start and one use-case.
Of course, any other feedback to or suggestions for this or any of the other stuff on that page is welcome too!
Cheers,
-hilmar
[1] http://evoinfo.nescent.org/Database_Interop_Hackathon [2] http://nexml.org