Rod, I am not saying a service should provide different formats. I was simply curious to know what the LSID specs suggest. I couldn't recall a discussion on what format would be most useful for clients.
Markus
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Roderic Page Sent: Donnerstag, 28. September 2006 15:50 To: Döring, Markus Cc: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Which TCS/RDF?
I'm, struggling a little to see why this is an issue. Surely a provider would aim to serve the format that is most use to consumers -- in which case, RDF/XML seems the obvious choice to me, given the availability of tools for handling XML (including web browsers).
Translating RDF/XML into alternative formats would simply require a XSL style sheet. For example, I use XSL to transform RDF into colour-coded XML, and HTML in my LSID tester. It should be trivial to convert RDF/XML into N-triple, for example. If consumers need N-triples, they can do the translation at their end. There are examples of this here http://www.semanticplanet.com/library/Main/RdfToTriplesStylesheet and here http://www.w3.org/2001/12/rubyrdf/xsltrdf/README.html.
Why not keep things simple? Providers serve the most generally useful format, and consumers massage that if necessary.
Regards
Rod
On 28 Sep 2006, at 11:49, Döring, Markus wrote:
Roger, I was rather thinking about different ways of serializing RDF. RDF/XML is just one way of expressing RDF and I would like to know if LSIDs (or TDWG) specifies that RDF/XML should be used. If a service is free to pick, a RDF framework, in contrast to templates, could probably easily return different formats for the same RDF graph. Markus
-----Original Message----- From: rogerhyam@googlemail.com [mailto:rogerhyam@googlemail.com] On Behalf Of Roger Hyam Sent: Donnerstag, 28. September 2006 11:53 To: Döring, Markus Cc: Steve Perry; peter.hollas@thomson.com; tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Which TCS/RDF?
Hi Markus,
The LSID spec suggests that RDF is the default return type but you can request different formats. We would just need to agree on names for the formats.
Thinking from a clients point of view consistency is the most important thing I guess especially if the data is going to be mixed with data from other sources. It would be far easier to write a client to handle just RDF than to handle RDF plus arbitrary other formats - perhaps with a plug in infrastructure etc etc.
All the best,
Roger
On 9/28/06, "Döring, Markus" m.doering@bgbm.org wrote: Hi,
I was wondering if the LSID specs require you to return RDF/XML. Could a service also return (or even request?) Turtle, N-Triple, RDFa or whatever comes next year?
It would be costly to switch formats using a templating system, so I am just curious.
Markus
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Perry Sent: Dienstag, 26. September 2006 18:12 To: peter.hollas@thomson.com Cc: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Which TCS/RDF?
Hi Peter,
I was just writing a response to your question about Jena, but I'll scrap it now. Unfortunately there's no standard representation for TCS in RDF at this time. Hopefully there will be one in the near future.
Jena is well suited to consuming RDF metadata, but I agree with you that it's a bit heavyweight if all you want to do is produce many instances of a single class.
Visualizing the problem as one of templating and using Spring MVC is a neat approach. I use Spring mostly for dependency injection and hadn't considered that it might be used to isolate this kind of software from changes in the schema.
-Steve
peter.hollas@thomson.com wrote:
Hi,
Could someone advise on which TCS/RDF ontology would be the best to implement for metadata coming from nomenclatural sources such as ZooBank? I've yet to come across anything other than a TCS XML
Schema
in public circulation.
I've decided to do away with using the Jena API altogether for returning metadata responses from ZooBank; it seems to be rather
heavy
handed approach to returning what is basically a simple structured text document. A much more flexible way to go is with a page templating system, especially when the schemata are in constant
flux.
A Spring Framework MVC/JSTL endpoint will allow for schemata
changes
to be implemented without recompilation. The LSID metadata class
will
just act as a façade/decorator to the templating system.
Many thanks, Peter.
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
--
Roger Hyam Technical Architect Taxonomic Databases Working Group
http://www.tdwg.org roger@tdwg.org
+44 1578 722782
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- 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
_______________________________________________ TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
Pardon my evangelical outburst. The standard itself (http://www.omg.org/docs/dtc/04-05-01.pdf) says little about formats, e.g. p. 19
"The Metadata_document is (usually) a string containing the metadata itself. It is considered out of the scope of this specification to restrict the number of formats that the metadata can be returned in. The most popular and expected formats are, however, RDF and XMI(sic)."
As a consumer, I prefer RDF because I want to aggregate information from different sources, and RDF + triple stores + SPARQL make this easy. Existing rich LSID clients (such as LSID LaunchPad) assume RDF/XML. Plus, RDF encourages the use of GUIDs (URIs) to explicitly identify resources, and there's a lot of interest from other communities in this topic (e.g., the Semantic Web), which means we get a lot of technology for free. For all these reasons, and consistent with the KISS principle, I think RDF/XML is the obvious candidate, and is indeed the only one being used to date in the LSID providers that are actually up and running.
Rod
On 28 Sep 2006, at 16:34, Döring, Markus wrote:
Rod, I am not saying a service should provide different formats. I was simply curious to know what the LSID specs suggest. I couldn't recall a discussion on what format would be most useful for clients.
Markus
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Roderic Page Sent: Donnerstag, 28. September 2006 15:50 To: Döring, Markus Cc: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Which TCS/RDF?
I'm, struggling a little to see why this is an issue. Surely a provider would aim to serve the format that is most use to consumers -- in which case, RDF/XML seems the obvious choice to me, given the availability of tools for handling XML (including web browsers).
Translating RDF/XML into alternative formats would simply require a XSL style sheet. For example, I use XSL to transform RDF into colour-coded XML, and HTML in my LSID tester. It should be trivial to convert RDF/XML into N-triple, for example. If consumers need N-triples, they can do the translation at their end. There are examples of this here http://www.semanticplanet.com/library/Main/RdfToTriplesStylesheet and here http://www.w3.org/2001/12/rubyrdf/xsltrdf/README.html.
Why not keep things simple? Providers serve the most generally useful format, and consumers massage that if necessary.
Regards
Rod
On 28 Sep 2006, at 11:49, Döring, Markus wrote:
Roger, I was rather thinking about different ways of serializing RDF. RDF/XML is just one way of expressing RDF and I would like to know if LSIDs (or TDWG) specifies that RDF/XML should be used. If a service is free to pick, a RDF framework, in contrast to templates, could probably easily return different formats for the same RDF graph. Markus
-----Original Message----- From: rogerhyam@googlemail.com [mailto:rogerhyam@googlemail.com] On Behalf Of Roger Hyam Sent: Donnerstag, 28. September 2006 11:53 To: Döring, Markus Cc: Steve Perry; peter.hollas@thomson.com; tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Which TCS/RDF?
Hi Markus,
The LSID spec suggests that RDF is the default return type but you can request different formats. We would just need to agree on names for the formats.
Thinking from a clients point of view consistency is the most important thing I guess especially if the data is going to be mixed with data from other sources. It would be far easier to write a client to handle just RDF than to handle RDF plus arbitrary other formats - perhaps with a plug in infrastructure etc etc.
All the best,
Roger
On 9/28/06, "Döring, Markus" m.doering@bgbm.org wrote: Hi,
I was wondering if the LSID specs require you to return RDF/XML. Could a service also return (or even request?) Turtle, N-Triple, RDFa or whatever comes next year?
It would be costly to switch formats using a templating system, so I am just curious.
Markus
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Perry Sent: Dienstag, 26. September 2006 18:12 To: peter.hollas@thomson.com Cc: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Which TCS/RDF?
Hi Peter,
I was just writing a response to your question about Jena, but I'll scrap it now. Unfortunately there's no standard representation for TCS in RDF at this time. Hopefully there will be one in the near future.
Jena is well suited to consuming RDF metadata, but I agree with you that it's a bit heavyweight if all you want to do is produce many instances of a single class.
Visualizing the problem as one of templating and using Spring MVC is a neat approach. I use Spring mostly for dependency injection and hadn't considered that it might be used to isolate this kind of software from changes in the schema.
-Steve
peter.hollas@thomson.com wrote:
Hi,
Could someone advise on which TCS/RDF ontology would be the best to implement for metadata coming from nomenclatural sources such as ZooBank? I've yet to come across anything other than a TCS XML
Schema
in public circulation.
I've decided to do away with using the Jena API altogether for returning metadata responses from ZooBank; it seems to be rather
heavy
handed approach to returning what is basically a simple structured text document. A much more flexible way to go is with a page templating system, especially when the schemata are in constant
flux.
A Spring Framework MVC/JSTL endpoint will allow for schemata
changes
to be implemented without recompilation. The LSID metadata class
will
just act as a façade/decorator to the templating system.
Many thanks, Peter.
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
--
Roger Hyam Technical Architect Taxonomic Databases Working Group
http://www.tdwg.org roger@tdwg.org
+44 1578 722782
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
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
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- 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
participants (2)
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"Döring, Markus" -
Roderic Page