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

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--
Robert A. Morris

Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
IT Staff
Filtered Push Project
Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University


email: morris.bob@gmail.com
web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)