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Dear All,
I've put together a web site called http://bioguid.info which, rather grandly, is an attempt to bootstrap the biodiversity Semantic Web by providing resolvable URIs for biological objects, such as publications, taxonomic names, nucleotide sequences, and specimens.
These URIs (or "GUIDs") can be resolved by a web browser to display HTML, but under the hood are resolved to RDF (which you can see by viewing the source of the web page you get for a URI).
The web interface is really window dressing, I just wanted a way to display RDF that wouldn't frighten people (me included). For some URIs all I do is grab XML and reformat it (e.g., DOIs). For GenBank records, all manner of agony is involved in trying to extract specimen and publication links.
A good place to get a sense of what bioguid.info is about is to start with this Pubmed record: http://bioguid.info/pmid:17079492
From this, you can get a list of sequences. If you click on one of those, you'll see a link to a specimen, which you can then look at (you'll need Firefox 1.5, Camino, Webkkit, or a browser with a SVG plugin for the full effect).
What I'm hoping to do is start doing things like taking a TreeBASE record, getting the linked sequences, running these through bioguid.info to extract georeferenced specimen links, so with minimal effort we get a map (and eventually a Google Earth tree a la Bill Piel).
The glue to make this happen comprises HTTP URIs that are dereferenceable to RDF. This is my mantra for the day.
Regards
Rod
------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html iChat: aim://rodpage1962 reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
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Roderic Page