This 'semantic tagging' is something that may be useful in some situations. The two examples I have been thinking about are:
1. Marking up existing schemas as you suggest. This might make it easier to transform between systems but would need investigating. We could also map the namespaces of the elements in instance documents and do it that way. 2. Marking up regular text in taxonomic literature could be done by extending XHTML. We could simply extend <span> and <div> tags to have a tdwg="" attribute that contains the URI or URN of the core class of thing between the tags. Regular browsers and text processors would ignore the additional attribute but could be extended to handle it. Simple applications could be written in JavaScript to extend browser functionality to give term expansion, associated searching etc. Data could be extracted with XSLT etc... Some clever person might even extend DreamWeaver or another editor to support authoring of the tagging but regular taxonomists who are using word processors at the moment. (This is a fantasy example and not a concrete suggestion of doing it this way!)
I think the point is that most of these technologies overlap and we are probably not talking using 100% of anything in a solution model.
All the best,
Roger
Phillip C. Dibner wrote:
At risk of sounding like a broken record (there's an anachronism for you),
I understand what we can gain by using semantic tools. I still have not clearly understood what we gain by RDF. What is wrong with simply tagging the schema elements with id attributes (or even rdf attributes - schema-schema is defined to support attributes from any other namespace) and then have an external ontology based on this?
Gregor---------------------------------------------------------- Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn@bba.de) Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA) Königin-Luise-Str. 19 Tel: +49-30-8304-2220 14195 Berlin, Germany Fax: +49-30-8304-2203
... this is essentially the approach taken by GML, and if I understand correctly, by ISO 19109. However, I do not know of tools that validate the internal semantic consistency of GML expressions or ISO 19109-compliant models.
Flip _______________________________________________ Tdwg-tag mailing list Tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag_lists.tdwg.org