Dear all,
I just have finished a TCS XML demo page at: http://taxonconcept.stratigraphy.net/taxon_tcs?taxid=793 which is a TCS representation of synonym list (concepts) data on the taxon 'Subbotina patagonica' published by Berggren & Norris (1997) and Pearson et al. (2006), see a html output here: http://taxonconcept.stratigraphy.net/taxon_details?taxid=793
The XML valdates against the schema, but of course, what I have implemented is a 'interpretation' of the standard, e.g. I have now summarized the two synonymies to one DataSet, and I am not sure if this granularity makes sense. So I would like to ask you to check if the output looks reasonable.
I was really happy to see how good TCS fits to my data and after I have seen the first results I realized how good this fits to an experiment I was trying some months ago:
I tried to apply the Google PageRank algorithm to synonymies and as a first attempt I calculated what I called TaxonRank. I have provided some more info on this here: http://stratigraphynet.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-taxonrank-works.html (+ my geoinformatics community prepared a special volume on ontologies etc and I have also submitted a paper to Computers&Geosciences which will be published soon).
After seeing the TCS XML output and reading many RDF and ontology related mailing list contributions I wonder if anybody has ever thought about doing something like this before? My tests are on synonymy list (concepts) only, but I think similar approaches could lead to interesting results also if applied to e.g. genetics. And..wouldn't be ranking based on such ontologies a killer application for GUIDs? apologies for cross posting..
Robert