Dear all,
This is clearly a crosscutting issue and I thought about using the TAPIR mailing list for the following reasons:
1) The main people involved with DarwinCore are subscribed here; 2) This issue raised from a TAPIR use case; 3) It can affect all existing TAPIR/DarwinCore providers, as well as all output models based on DarwinCore.
As you know, there was a recent release of TapirLink which includes an LSID authority that serves an RDF representation of DarwinCore by default.
Everything seems to be working fine, but when I parse the resulting RDF in the W3C validator, I see that the predicates are being displayed as:
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwcoreGenus
While in the semantic world the "expected" representation would be something like:
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwcore#Genus
Apparently it seems just a cosmetic thing, but after some quick research this "unexpected representation" can cause problems depending on usage and tools: for instance, if it's necessary to perform RDF/XML round-tripping, then semantic web tools may not work if there's no clear separation between the namespace URI and local names, which is normally done by using the fragment identifier.
If you're interested, you can find a similar discussion here: http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg16476.html
Which has this interesting follow-up: http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg16480.html
Since the new DarwinCore version and its extensions are not yet a TDWG standard and may even be subject to other changes, I'm proposing to add the fragment identifier to all Darwin namespaces. Better to do this as soon as possible if we're going to need this in the future.
Please let me know if you have any comments, ideas or concerns...
It may be the case that this change will affect other things (like the new GBIF REST service) although probably not as much as TAPIR/DarwinCore providers which will need to re-map their databases.
Best Regards, -- Renato