Another reason why RDF is cool
I know that there is some scepticism about RDF, so I thought I'd relate an experience I had yesterday at The Natural History Museum in London. A colleague of mine has often complained about how hard it is to get his data (and data others have) into a useful form for the web, and that efforts such as the Semantic Web only seem to make this harder. So, as an experiment, I attempted to get some information about an ant image into a local triple store. This involved putting some triples in a table using EditGrid (an online spreadsheet), grabbing the XML, converting it to RDF, and importing that into the triple store. See here for details: http://semant.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-triples-using-editgrid.html. The bottom line is that it was trivially easy to go from a spreadsheet to a triple store, and hence add new information about this ant. Writing it up in the blog took as long as the actual work. This particular example concerns one image harvested from the web. Things like adding distribution records in bulk would be even easier. So, my question is this: is there anything other than RDF that can make this as straightforward as it is? If so, I'd love to hear it... Regards 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 Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
Nice demo Rod! Makes me wonder how I can get a script to generate a spreadsheet to fill in based on an RDFS vocabulary. Basically would be sheet for each class, row for each instance, column for each property.....hmmm - maybe later. Roger Roderic Page wrote:
I know that there is some scepticism about RDF, so I thought I'd relate an experience I had yesterday at The Natural History Museum in London. A colleague of mine has often complained about how hard it is to get his data (and data others have) into a useful form for the web, and that efforts such as the Semantic Web only seem to make this harder.
So, as an experiment, I attempted to get some information about an ant image into a local triple store. This involved putting some triples in a table using EditGrid (an online spreadsheet), grabbing the XML, converting it to RDF, and importing that into the triple store. See here for details: http://semant.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-triples-using-editgrid.html.
The bottom line is that it was trivially easy to go from a spreadsheet to a triple store, and hence add new information about this ant. Writing it up in the blog took as long as the actual work.
This particular example concerns one image harvested from the web. Things like adding distribution records in bulk would be even easier.
So, my question is this: is there anything other than RDF that can make this as straightforward as it is? If so, I'd love to hear it...
Regards
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
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
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-- ------------------------------------- Roger Hyam Technical Architect Taxonomic Databases Working Group ------------------------------------- http://www.tdwg.org roger@tdwg.org +44 1578 722782 -------------------------------------
Actually, Kevin Thiele came up with a spreadsheet representation that may be of of the sort you are looking for in a meeting about the Global Invasive Species Information Network (GISIN), about which there is a TDWG session on Saturday. I'm charged with mentioning Kevin's representation. It's discussed at http://wiki.cs.umb.edu/twiki/bin/view/IASPS/SampleDefinitions although dormant for a while. Contributions to that wiki welcome. Bob Roger Hyam wrote:
Nice demo Rod!
Makes me wonder how I can get a script to generate a spreadsheet to fill in based on an RDFS vocabulary. Basically would be sheet for each class, row for each instance, column for each property.....hmmm - maybe later.
Roger
Roderic Page wrote:
I know that there is some scepticism about RDF, so I thought I'd relate an experience I had yesterday at The Natural History Museum in London. A colleague of mine has often complained about how hard it is to get his data (and data others have) into a useful form for the web, and that efforts such as the Semantic Web only seem to make this harder.
So, as an experiment, I attempted to get some information about an ant image into a local triple store. This involved putting some triples in a table using EditGrid (an online spreadsheet), grabbing the XML, converting it to RDF, and importing that into the triple store. See here for details: http://semant.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-triples-using-editgrid.html.
The bottom line is that it was trivially easy to go from a spreadsheet to a triple store, and hence add new information about this ant. Writing it up in the blog took as long as the actual work.
This particular example concerns one image harvested from the web. Things like adding distribution records in bulk would be even easier.
So, my question is this: is there anything other than RDF that can make this as straightforward as it is? If so, I'd love to hear it...
Regards
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
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
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-- Robert A. Morris Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston ram@cs.umb.edu http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466
Hi, some comments on http://semant.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-triples-using- editgrid.html: A practical problem is of course the choice of predicates from a vocabulary of millions of potential URIs. In prinicpal, that is universal, but it is relevant if the assumption is that raw tools suffice and are easy. This reminds me a bit of the older DELTA pioneers who simply had remembered the their characters and state numbers (i.e. equivalent of URIs) by heart. A more general thing that bothers me about using RDF: if I have many such statements without knowing who made them (e.g. someone I know, someone I know can identify this ant, someone I know cannot), perhaps when (I myself as a student years ago or just now), and under which circumstances (including whether from own observation or citing other sources), these data become of doubtful value. Dealing with this in RDF using reification mechanism seems to be a management problem. I belief treating statements as naturally related (e.g. a chapter in a book, a wiki page) is more natural than treating them as atomic. Gregor Hagedorn
I know that there is some scepticism about RDF, so I thought I'd relate an experience I had yesterday at The Natural History Museum in London. A colleague of mine has often complained about how hard it is to get his data (and data others have) into a useful form for the web, and that efforts such as the Semantic Web only seem to make this harder.
So, as an experiment, I attempted to get some information about an ant image into a local triple store. This involved putting some triples in a table using EditGrid (an online spreadsheet), grabbing the XML, converting it to RDF, and importing that into the triple store. See here for details: http://semant.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-triples-using-editgrid.html.
The bottom line is that it was trivially easy to go from a spreadsheet to a triple store, and hence add new information about this ant. Writing it up in the blog took as long as the actual work.
This particular example concerns one image harvested from the web. Things like adding distribution records in bulk would be even easier.
So, my question is this: is there anything other than RDF that can make this as straightforward as it is? If so, I'd love to hear it...
Regards
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
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
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---------------------------------------------------------- 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
I like to think of RDF as one of those technologies that makes it easy to do easy things (Rod's position) and possible to do hard things (my position, and perhaps Gregor's) Roger was talking about how to generate a spreadsheet to fill in based on an RDFS vocabulary. We use the reverse process for browsing data through the WASABI portal (part of the project formerly known as DiGIR2). This is a common approach with RDF-based portals like the Semantic Web Environmental Directory (SWED). Building what Roger describes could be quite easy or it could be quite difficult; it all depends upon the complexity of the underling ontology. -Steve Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
Hi, some comments on http://semant.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-triples-using- editgrid.html:
A practical problem is of course the choice of predicates from a vocabulary of millions of potential URIs. In prinicpal, that is universal, but it is relevant if the assumption is that raw tools suffice and are easy. This reminds me a bit of the older DELTA pioneers who simply had remembered the their characters and state numbers (i.e. equivalent of URIs) by heart.
A more general thing that bothers me about using RDF: if I have many such statements without knowing who made them (e.g. someone I know, someone I know can identify this ant, someone I know cannot), perhaps when (I myself as a student years ago or just now), and under which circumstances (including whether from own observation or citing other sources), these data become of doubtful value.
Dealing with this in RDF using reification mechanism seems to be a management problem. I belief treating statements as naturally related (e.g. a chapter in a book, a wiki page) is more natural than treating them as atomic.
Gregor Hagedorn
I know that there is some scepticism about RDF, so I thought I'd relate an experience I had yesterday at The Natural History Museum in London. A colleague of mine has often complained about how hard it is to get his data (and data others have) into a useful form for the web, and that efforts such as the Semantic Web only seem to make this harder.
So, as an experiment, I attempted to get some information about an ant image into a local triple store. This involved putting some triples in a table using EditGrid (an online spreadsheet), grabbing the XML, converting it to RDF, and importing that into the triple store. See here for details: http://semant.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-triples-using-editgrid.html.
The bottom line is that it was trivially easy to go from a spreadsheet to a triple store, and hence add new information about this ant. Writing it up in the blog took as long as the actual work.
This particular example concerns one image harvested from the web. Things like adding distribution records in bulk would be even easier.
So, my question is this: is there anything other than RDF that can make this as straightforward as it is? If so, I'd love to hear it...
Regards
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
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
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---------------------------------------------------------- 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
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participants (5)
-
Bob Morris -
Gregor Hagedorn -
Roderic Page -
Roger Hyam -
Steven Perry