Like Stan I was hoping for something that was more accessible that allowed for open participation in the process. Even tools like web protege are too complicated from what we need to achieve. A 300+ page OMG metamodel specification is not a good place to start.
I was also thinking of something based on DCMI made available via a simple editable tabular structure using the TDWG wiki. A Poor man's RDFS to function as a common repository and cross reference for our Ontologies. One concept per page using the wiki page graph to establish relationships. Extraction from this place to Metamodel compliant implementations or to application level schema should be trivial. The aim being to turn the process around so that those of us required to work at the more esoteric end of this spectrum are aware of and building against community level requirements.
I personally believe this to be within our current capabilities and certainly achievable before the next TDWG meeting.
greg
2009/4/25 Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com:
There is an OMG Metamodel for ontology description. At least one implementation of it http://www.eclipse.org/m2m/atl/usecases/ODMImplementation/ claims to support designing OWL ontologies with UML,
I think it was Markus who pointed me at a commercial product that has OWL<-->UML<-->XML Schema or something like that. I think I was underwhelmed by it at Bratislava when I last tried it, but maybe it is better now.
One gotcha about OWL as normative that always worries me is that a lot non-specialist folks thing RDF means RDF/XML. That wouldn't stop me from using it though. After all, it's a golden road(*) to machine reasoning.... :-)
Bob
(*)Not to be confused with a yellow-brick road.
On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Roger Hyam rogerhyam@mac.com wrote:
Hi Markus,
My plan is to produce an abstract model (a text description of the classes and properties) and a series of example concrete models. One would be the OWL ontology (perhaps this would be normative not sure yet) another would be a CSV file format and a third would be a simple (one namespace) XML file format. I will define mappings between all these (possibly XSLT to get from XML to CSV and OWL).
I also plan to do a mapping from the IPT checklist format to one or all of these things.
It would be good to write a couple of tools to do some auto conversion.
If I cut out all the rubbish and only include what is actually used we are only talking two classes and < thirty properties so I should be able beat the thing into submission quiet quickly.
All the best,
Roger
On 24 Apr 2009, at 12:07, Markus Döring (GBIF) wrote:
Roger, if you are working on that already, what do you think are the chances to have a one to one mapping from the taxonomic dwc terms to the names & taxon classes in the ontology?
We are using the dwc terms not only for occurrence records, but are already encoding pure taxonomic or nomenclatural checklists with simple dwc terms. Within ECAT and also the Global Names Index / Architecture we have started sharing such checklists encoded as text files which are far easier to handle than TCS-RDF, especially when dealing with hundreds of thousands of names. The expressiveness is of course limited, but it allows us to easily share all of the basic taxonomic/nomenclatural information such as synonyms, basionyms, taxonomic hierarchies, taxon concept reference, original publication, nomenclatural code, nomenclatural & taxonomic status, rank, atomised name parts and the classic higher dwc ranks for each name. I would be super glad to see a convergence with the ontology here.
Markus
On Apr 24, 2009, at 11:54, Roger Hyam wrote:
Hi Peter,
The TaxonOccurrence standard is not actually a standard. It is part of the vocabulary that was put together two years ago and maps well to DwC.
Meanwhile, as Markus points out, DwC has gone its own way.
The whole TDWG ontology needs some clarification and sorting out and as Bob points out this is now done on a voluntary basis.
I am working on the TaxonName and TaxonConcept vocabularies because I need to use them. I hope I will provide what Markus requests (good return type definitions for GUIDs) but I will only do it for taxon names and concepts because that is all I am working on. I hope to take this to a stage where it is solid, documented and standardizable.
This will entail doing some stuff on the way the TDWG ontology/ vocabulary is presented but really it is not my department to do that alone.
This is very important for TDWG (as Markus points out).
What really needs to happen is for people who need things to happen in the ontology to role up their sleeves and make them happen.
For occurrence stuff I recommend you join forces with John Wieczorek.
All the best,
Roger
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