How would you answer your question about
1. XML 2. XML validated by XML-Schema 3. CSV 4. ASCII dumps of relational data
If there is an answer, X, for one of those, an answer to your challenge will, often, be that RDF accomplishes things like X but without difficult D, for various values of D.
It's also arguable, that the formal semantics available to the RDF stack and other ontology-based data representation schemes, allows the building hypothesis testing software, sometimes more easily than, for example, data mining. The biomedical community has been doing that for 30 years or more. Most other sciences are just now getting with the program.
On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:40 AM, Roderic Page r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk wrote:
It's morning and the coffee hasn't quite kicked in yet, but reading through recent TDWG TAG posts, and mindful of the upcoming meeting in New Orleans (which sadly I won't be attending) I'm seeing a mismatch between the amount of effort being expended on discussions of vocabularies, ontologies, etc. and the concrete results we can point to. Hence, a challenge: "What new things have we learnt about biodiversity by converting biodiversity data into RDF?" I'm not saying we can't learn new things, I'm simply asking what have we learnt so far? Since around 2006 we have had literally millions of triples in the wild (uBio, ION, Index Fungorum, IPNI, Catalogue of Life, more recently Biodiversity Collections Index, Atlas of Living Australia, World Register of Marine Species, etc.), most of these using the same vocabulary. What new inferences have we made? Let's make the challenge more concrete. Load all these data sources into a triple store (subchallenge - is this actually possible?). Perhaps add other RDF sources (DBpedia, Bio2RDF, CrossRef). What novel inferences can we make?
I may, of course, simply be in "grumpy old arse" mode, but we have millions of triples in the wild and nothing to show for it. I hope I'm not alone in wondering why...
Regards Rod
Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag