A big caveat about the plants section of NCBI taxonomy is that they chose (for genetic reasons) to use the quite incomplete APG system instead of the more universally used Chronquist system.  More about the differences at: http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/carr/pfamilies.htm

Soaring Bear Ph.D. Pharmacology soaringbear at yahoo.com

http://soaringbear.com/nature/WeedsforNeeds.html

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/presentations/bear_2005_aug/index.htm

author of http://HerbMed.org & http://HerbInsight.com

--- On Sat, 7/11/09, Roderic Page r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk wrote:

I've been playing with expressing the NCBI taxonomy in TDWG RDF. The  results are described at http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/07/ncbi-rdf.html   (see also http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/07/ncbi-taxonomy-tdwg-vocabularies-and-rdf.h...   for some background).

It's still incomplete (I've not put links up and down the tree yet),  but for now the focus is on expressing links to nomenclators that  support LSIDs (such as IPNI and Index Fungorum) so that I can annotate  the NCBI taxonomy via SPARQL queries.

One minor comment, the property "rankString" has been deprecated  (apparently), but it makes sense to retain this as there may well be  ranks that a classification has that aren't in the TDWG vocabulary.  Hence, I'd be keen for this NOT to be deprecated.

Regards

Rod

--------------------------------------------------------- Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy DEEB, FBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK