Hi,

I am new to these discussions so I am sorry if am not interpreting things correctly.

I think of a species as a concept. The label for that concept changes when the name changes but the idea that this is a species remains.

So if I want to represent the species Aedes triseriatus, I would mark it up as a class.

Since I am focusing on species found in Wisconsin I might consider having the Wisconsin Aedes triseriatus be a subclass of the North American Subclass of Aedes triseriatus which is a subclass of all Aedes triseriatus.

If the label for Aedes triseriatus changes to Ochlerotatus triseriatus, the species concept is still the same. What has changed is that others feel that this species relationship to other species is different than what they thougth previously.

In looking over these discussions it would seem that if species should be represented as classes then lsid's should not be used to represent them.

It would be ok, however, to represent one individual Ochlerotatus triseriatus using an lsid.

This makes me wonder if the descriptors used for this species should be represented as classes such as

PalpiBanded PalipiUnbanded

Then you would be able to train a computer to assign a given image to either the set of PalpiBanded or PalpiUnbanded.

It also makes me think that the best way to represent the Wisconsin species is with a unique URL that includes metadata pointing to the other representations of this concept at the uBioNamebank NCBI etc.

A species concept url could be something like

www.ex.org/SpeciesConcepts/549173 -> points to RDF, Web, uBio, NCBI

A character concept url could be something like

www.ex.org/CharacterConcepts/2343234 <- PalpiBanded www.ex.org/CharacterConcepts/2342945 <- PalliUnbanded

A given image might be marked up as an instance of PalpiBanded

This would allow a set of PalpiBanded images to be created and accessed making imaged based computer identification easier.

So far I am thinking the following structure

/TaxonConcepts/Kingdom /TaxonConcepts/Phylum ...

/SpeciesConcepts/549173 <- use number since name changes? i.e. concept of Aedes triseriatus

/CharacterConcepts/2343234 <- number? for a particular character state

/HabitatConcepts/Boreal_Forest <- points to specific definition, examples

/BioticIndexConcepts/9 <- points to definition of a Biotic Index of 9, examples

Am I thinking this through correctly?

Thanks in Advance :-)

--------------------------------------------------------------- Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 Email: pdevries@wisc.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------