In drafting an RDF representation of MRTG[1], I am struggling with how close to stay to the DC and DwC minimalist style of ontology architecture. I find this well justified by the sentence "For example, though the data types and constraints are not provided in the term definitions, recommendations are made about how to restrict the values where appropriate" in the DwC introduction[2].
What I'm struggling with is how much to slant MRTG---which uses a lot of DwC--more toward OWL or more towards only RDF. See [3] for discussion of the dillemma raised when you put any of the DC or DwC RDF files into Protege4 or WonderWeb, the Manchester OWL Validator[4]. Roughly speaking, I took [3] to be the Manchester and Stanford axis of OWL to be saying, "In the future, don't expect to talk about OWL without stronger typing." {As I understand DwC/RDF, this all is accomplished by declaring terms to be mainly rdf:Property with the only typification coming from the assertions using the predicate dwcattributes:organizedInClass }.
So my questions are possibly:
1. What committment does TAG have to OWL 2. Has TAG examined the applicability to TDWG of the W3 OWL 2 recommendations recently advanced to the Proposed Recommendation stage [4], [5], or its relatives. 3. If no to 2, is there a plan to do so? Against what use cases?
A few months ago, Roger seemed to wax enthusiastic about Knowledge Representation and reasoning on biodiversity data, but I haven't seen much traffic about what are the modeling requirements to support that, or whether TAG has a plan to move that way.
Bob Morris
[1] MRTG 0.8 http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.8 [2] DwC intro http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm [3] p4-feedback thread on rdf:Property https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/p4-feedback/2009-October/002448.html [4] WonderWeb http://www.mygrid.org.uk/OWL/Validator [5] OWL2 Overview http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/PR-owl2-syntax-20090922/ [5] OWL2 rdf semantics http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/PR-owl2-rdf-based-semantics-20090922/