People can use OWL or GML or TAPIR or ... but which do the clients actually want to use? It would be a lot easier if we only used one. A few client applications would certainly clarify things.
I know this won't surprise regular readers, but if any client is thinking of using more than one data source, is there anything as simple and as general as RDF? I spend most of my time mangling all sorts of weird stuff (Darwin Core in all its variants, Google Earth KML, CrossRef XML, PubMed XML, Genbank XML, HTML, Yahoo Images XML, etc., much of it all nicely defined with - gack - XML schemas, that of course I don't actually read) into RDF so I can actually do something.
Within a single domain people can pretty much do what they like (and have done so), but once we start sharing and aggregating (e.g., specimens, images, sequences, publications, observations, people) then why not aim for one data format and a few simple, shared vocabularies.
I'm sure this is naive, but it seems that we persist in making things just about as difficult as we possibly can.
Rod
------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html iChat: aim://rodpage1962 reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
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