Hi Roger,
Nice document. Just some comments:
-Tonto is a little bit bad name in spanish.
-Have you considered something about controlled vocabularies in the semantic hub? Or maybe what I prefer to call managed controlled vocabularies. For example in ABCD there is a concept called "KindOfRecord", it is not a controlled vocabulary, is just a text. It would be too difficult to provide a fix list of terms for it so would be great if the list can somehow be created in a community base. Let say that I want to map my database to this field, I could get a list of proposed terms already being used, if none of them satisfy me then i can create my own one. It is a little bit like tagging in a control way. I love the del.icio.us example, they propose you tags and most of the time I use them, and by doing this then the data is much more accessible because the tags have not exploded. The opposite os what is happening now in ABCD everybody use a different term for the same thing and the unified data becomes useless.
-In the implementation section you say something like "Data Providers must map their data to these views" referring to views from the semantic hub. This is actually we are trying to avoid. TAPIR at the beginning was created with the vision of data providers mapping once their databases and being accessible through different views that are explicitly declared on the request. We changed the name now and we are calling it outputModels. In the other hand you know that WASABI and PyWrapper are now becoming muti-protocol. That means that we want providers to map their databases once and make the data available in different protocols.
So, again, within TAPIR itself and within protocols we need something like the semantic hub you are proposing. And we are doing it right now but very primitive. I am working on the implementation of the BioMOBY protocol inside PyWrapper. I had created a mapping file between TDWG schemas and MOBY data types registry so that I can resolve questions like: -Ok, if I have these TDWG concepts mapped, which MOBY services could I create. -How can I create this MOBY types using TDWG concepts?
As I said this is now being implemented in a simple flat file that will be available in Internet for all data providers, but I am not accessing it as a service and I have to do all the handling on the client. The semantic Hub you are proposing is exactly what we need and want to do this more properly.
So... summarizing, from our side I can imagine now that we need:
-the semantic hub must expose the concepts in a way that we can use them in our configuration tools in the data providers to allow mapping a database there. -the semantic hub must expose the different views, or outputModels as we call them in TAPIR, so that providers software can produce them.
There is a full list of other requirements I would love to see there that can be found in Dave Thau's work on a schema repository, do you remember? http://ww3.bgbm.org/schemarepowiki
Specially there where things like: -Give an XSLT that transforms ABCD 1.2 into 2.06 -Give me labels for this concept -Give me examples of values for this concept ...
I hope to be half clear as your document is :)
Javier.
On 8/7/06, Roger Hyam roger@tdwg.org wrote:
Hi Everyone,
The TDWG Infrastructure Project team have a milestone/deliverable to produce a document to act as a road map for the TDWG Architecture.
I have prepared a document that I believe pulls together the ideas and consequences from the TAG-1 meeting and the two GUID meetings plus various discussions held at the OGC meeting in Edinburgh. This document introduces the notion of a 'Semantic Hub' which is a proposed mechanism to expose TDWG semantics through multiple technologies: XML Schema; GML; OWL; etc.
I would be most grateful if you could find time to have a look at this six page document:
http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/ArchitectureOverview
and give any feedback on the wiki page, via this list or directly to me.
Many thanks,
Roger
--
Roger Hyam Technical Architect Taxonomic Databases Working Group
http://www.tdwg.org roger@tdwg.org
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