A detail I would like to discuss  within this context in the near future is the best possible way to link species names to genetic resources (e.g. DNA barcodes).

Well, the simplest way is if the genetic resources themselves have GUIDs (such as an LSID, Biopathways.org provides some for NCBI, and I'm playing with this as well). Then one simply adds one or more tags to the metadata associated with the resource. For example, using RDF a DNA sequence could have a tag such as

<dc:source rdf:resource="urn:lsid:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:TaxId:345788" />

indicating it comes from the taxonomy with NCBI's TaxId 345788.

For the taxon one could use a tag like

<dcterms:isReferencedBy rdf:resource="urn:lsid:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:genbank:AF234577" />

indicating that sequence AF234577 comes from this taxon [both LSIDs are made up, I could create functional ones if it woulod help the discussion].

The "dc" and "dcterms" are from the Dublin Core namespace (http://dublincore.org). This illustrates a point I've made elsewhere, but one of my biggest gripes about current XML efforts in taxonomy is the use of XML schema and custom namespaces for everything, whereas I think RDF is much leaner and we can employ existing namespaces for most (but not all) of what we need. Plus we can embed our efforts in a much larger community of projects. Again, I recommend keeping things simple and using existing standards wherever possible.

Regards

Rod

------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom

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