This is carrying on from Steve's comments under the "Taxon debate synthesis?" thread. I started a new thread as it seemed to be getting a little deep and no longer fitting the title.

Steve's comments are hitting the nail right on the head. From the conversations and thoughts I am having about architecture of TDWG standards all roads are leading to RDF - which is annoying because it makes writing balanced documents that compare the alternatives difficult :)

Steve outlined one of the most promising paths forward for TDWG standards. Taking this route is not a matter of just saying "lets do it all in RDF" there would be a long way to go if we went this way - but at least we would be doing things the same way the rest of the semantic web world and that means there are tools and people out there to help.

The one point Steve didn't stress is that RDF is the "bees knees" for data handshaking - i.e. combining data from different domains. This means that the extensibility and version problems that are our main hurdles as the moment will tend to go away. But have no fear there will be other problems to replace them.

I am comfortable talking about GUIDs in terms of moving towards representing TDWG data in RDF. It certainly makes more sense of the GUID discussions to me. But...

What we need to bear in mind is that there is a great deal of knowledge captured in XML Schema within the TDWG community and that knowledge (or at least the good bits of it) need to be migrated forwards. People have also invested a great deal of effort in developing XML Schemas and may be reluctant to move on.

This is all leading to TAG stuff rather than GUID stuff but as Steve and Rod and others point out the two are very closely connected - along with the protocol stuff...

How much should the GUID debate assume that we are using current XML Schema based standards and how much should it assume a move to an RDF style approach - or doesn't it matter?

Roger

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------------------------------------- Roger Hyam Technical Architect Taxonomic Databases Working Group ------------------------------------- http://www.tdwg.org roger@tdwg.org +44 1578 722782 -------------------------------------