Re: [tdwg-tag] [BULK] TDWG ontology revisited ... a newcomer's perspective
As one of those not-so-newcomers who has been attending TDWG meetings for the last few years I feel I should speak out in agreement with Lynette. Whilst I may understand the general ideas the techno-speak is truly baffling. I appreciate that technology is evolving and the TDWG community is looking for the best way to embrace it but could you not spare a thought for those organisations like mine who have information they would like to share but are bewildered by the multitude of ways to do it? Having limited development resources the last thing I want my organisation to do is deliver information using technology "a" which is currently flavour of the moment only to find in twelve months that we should really be using technology "b" because that is what everyone else is using. I feel there is also a divide here between the research community which can chop and change the way it handles its data and the more constrained organisations such as mine where the data is of critical/core use to the organisation and can't be re-purposed as easily.
Perhaps TDWG would also consider identifying mentors who would be willing to offer support to those lurking in the back of Aladdin's Cave currently too scared to come out into the light?
Rupert Wilson
RHS Horticultural Database
Royal Horticultural Society
Wisley, UK.
________________________________
From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Lynette.Woodburn@csiro.au Sent: 14 May 2009 04:31 To: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: [BULK] [tdwg-tag] TDWG ontology revisited ... a newcomer's perspective Importance: Low
Back to basics ...
Anyone new to biodiversity informatics (in general) and TDWG (in particular) might be expected, as a first step, to seek a broad understanding of the scope of the knowledge domain which is of interest to the community they've just joined. Next, they're likely to want to gain an understanding of each of the main concepts and to discover how those concepts relate to one other. Delving yet deeper, curiosity will lead them to seek details about features used by the community to characterise each of those main concepts. So, gradually, it is anticipated that newcomers will gain an understanding of the meaning associated by their fellow community members with elements (concepts, features, relationships) within the knowledge domain. (Those elements are, after all, the chief subjects of discourse amongst community members.)
This fantastic voyage of discovery, these first steps into Aladdin's Cave, ought to be made easy for any newcomer. Instead, TDWG presents a dizzying array of perspectives on disparate subsets of elements within the knowledge domain, often with only cryptic, tenuous links binding them together. 'Horses-for-courses'-drivers clearly exist for these subsets, but where is the common community understanding of where each element fits into the broader, shared knowledge domain which is TDWG's scope?
I fully support any initiative which more effectively leads newcomers (and not-so-newcomers) to that place: that place where I would hope to find, in plain expressions devoid of techno-speak, a description of each real world element (concept, feature, relationship), together with a simple representation (a label?) by which the TDWG community prefers each to be referred; that place which evolves, but endures, independently of technological fashions and particular implementations; that place I can visit to paint a picture in my mind's eye of TDWG's own Aladdin's Cave.
Lynette Woodburn
Atlas of Living Australia
Unfortunately, I agree. I am trying to learn for years now the vocabulary of the semantic web, reasoning, OWL, the difference of modeling something as a subclass versus instances of a class, etc. By now I can fake some knowledge, but the ontology technology is still so much beyond me that I am unable to contribute much more than silence. We have a big separation between people who find using Protege a natural thing and people knowledgable in the domain, but bewildered by the technology. This is no criticism of the ontology developers, who were and are working very hard and indeed made things much easier to look at than they started at. And I am not suggesting going back. Clearly TDWG when it jumped to the top of the technology stack had the right direction (even though I believe, the wrong timing).
However, I would like suggest something from my experience: The only time I have been using a semantic web tool in which I felt I could contribute, spanning the gap between rich-text explanations and precise RDF-based expressions, was the Semantic Media Wiki extension.
I would love to use this as a base much more than the programmer-oriented tools that are currently used by the TDWG ontology people.
Does anyone second me here?
Gregor
(PS The above does not claim that SDD as a plain old xml standard is so much better documented....)
Greg wrote:
priority. Somewhere between Roger's lsid vocabularies and the MRTG schema page there must be a way to achieve this.
Is Semantic-mediawiki an option?
:-) :-) :-)
I should say the MRTG stuff is a very pragmatic way to go beyond Word or Excel.
With some effort, you can give each class, each property a page. In Semantic Media Wiki this make sense, since the corresponding RDF is directly exposed. You would then have to make overview pages (bringing the separate pages into a synthesis view). I know how to do this with the DPL extension, but it is very laborious which is why we did not use it in MRTG. I guess SMW has good tools, but while I master mediawiki, I don't master SMW yet. Roderic Page does though :-)
Gregor
Gregor somewhat overstates my mastery of Semantic Mediawiki (SMW), but it is a useful tool to play with these ideas. You can embed RDF vocabularies, and display these for the propellor heads like us (who get an unnatural degree of pleasure from this sort of thing), or hide them behind nice forms for entering and editing data.
For example, here's an example:
http://itaxon.org/wikidev/Doi:10.1071/ZO9780789
This is a paper that describes some Australian nematodes, and the page is linked to the paper's author, the journal, and the taxonomic names.
One thing advantage that SMW has that I think is very cool is that, because of its templates, you can effectively program it by writing wiki pages (unlike a CMS such as Drupal, where you have to hack the underlying code). This makes it very powerful, as well as easy to document (each vocabulary element has a wiki page, where you can specify what it means).
So, two thoughts:
1. I've been arguing recently that decent progress in the field requires massive aggregation coupled with good tools for editing. Editing requires version control. We also need to be open to users creating unexpected content/annotations. We also want to have a tool that can make inferences (i.e., the sort of thing databases make trivial).
To my mind, once you think of open-ended, versioned editing, you are thinking of a wiki.
2. I doubt the OWL inference/reasoning stuff will ever fly on the scale we need. Keep stuff very simple. We can gain a great deal simply from joining the dots.
Regards
Rod
On 14 May 2009, at 10:19, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
Greg wrote:
priority. Somewhere between Roger's lsid vocabularies and the MRTG schema page there must be a way to achieve this.
Is Semantic-mediawiki an option?
:-) :-) :-)
I should say the MRTG stuff is a very pragmatic way to go beyond Word or Excel.
With some effort, you can give each class, each property a page. In Semantic Media Wiki this make sense, since the corresponding RDF is directly exposed. You would then have to make overview pages (bringing the separate pages into a synthesis view). I know how to do this with the DPL extension, but it is very laborious which is why we did not use it in MRTG. I guess SMW has good tools, but while I master mediawiki, I don't master SMW yet. Roderic Page does though :-)
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
--------------------------------------------------------- Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy DEEB, FBLS 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
Hi Rupert
Sorry I didn't specifically address your idea about mentors in my last post. It's a darn good notion, but I fear that the techies who are the ones who know the domain best are so overloaded (and in some cases burnt out) that adding mentoring to their agenda may be tricky. TDWG depends on a few key individuals with advanced skills to progress standards development. Those poor buggers are stretched to the limit. All the rest of us struggle to comprehend, let alone catch up.
But as many have said, TDWG needs to address the knowledge gap. I have sponsored 1-page 'Executive Summaries' for Darwin Core, ABCD, TCS, TAPIR, NCD (see the various groups web sites) but we don't have anything similar on the ontology for example. I may try and tackle this unless someone else would like to have a go. Any others ideas are more than welcomed.
We did run a series of introductory workshops at the meeting last year in Fremantle. These were extremely well attended and did seem to work a treat in getting a lot of people up to speed in four different. By the way that the programme is shaping for Montpellier, it looks extremely doubtful that we will have opportunity for a similar set of workshops, except maybe for an EDIT scratchpad workshop I believe. I suspect that the Theme on Data Integration that Roger is leading may provide an opportunity to get up to speed and advance some aspects. Feel free to add to the current pandemonium of the poor Programme Committee at http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/Conferences/Tdwg2009.
I've cc'd Adrian who can add your mentoring idea to the agenda of the Executive Committee meeting that we need to have soon. BTW: I have led the push for mentoring in two large organisations, currently have a mentor and am mentoring someone else. So I am a keen advocate!
Cheers
Lee
Lee Belbin
TDWG Secretariat
From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of rupertwilson@rhs.org.uk Sent: Thursday, 14 May 2009 6:56 PM To: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Cc: Lynette.Woodburn@csiro.au Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] [BULK] TDWG ontology revisited ... a newcomer's perspective
As one of those not-so-newcomers who has been attending TDWG meetings for the last few years I feel I should speak out in agreement with Lynette. Whilst I may understand the general ideas the techno-speak is truly baffling. I appreciate that technology is evolving and the TDWG community is looking for the best way to embrace it but could you not spare a thought for those organisations like mine who have information they would like to share but are bewildered by the multitude of ways to do it? Having limited development resources the last thing I want my organisation to do is deliver information using technology "a" which is currently flavour of the moment only to find in twelve months that we should really be using technology "b" because that is what everyone else is using. I feel there is also a divide here between the research community which can chop and change the way it handles its data and the more constrained organisations such as mine where the data is of critical/core use to the organisation and can't be re-purposed as easily.
Perhaps TDWG would also consider identifying mentors who would be willing to offer support to those lurking in the back of Aladdin's Cave currently too scared to come out into the light?
Rupert Wilson
RHS Horticultural Database
Royal Horticultural Society
Wisley, UK.
ceipt or use thereof.
participants (4)
-
Gregor Hagedorn -
Lee Belbin -
Roderic Page -
rupertwilson＠rhs.org.uk