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!)
   

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
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-- 

-------------------------------------
 Roger Hyam
 Technical Architect
 Taxonomic Databases Working Group
-------------------------------------
 http://www.tdwg.org
 roger@tdwg.org
 +44 1578 722782
-------------------------------------