string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me%22/%3E rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
I absolutely agree with Bob - we should always be encouraging reuse / linking / referencing of "external" Ids. Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 6:27 a.m. To: Steve Baskauf Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
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Hi Bob - should the same term allow both types of content, or should there be a different term for each? Does it matter? Should applications be smart enough to tell the difference and know what to do with it?
Not really asking what the specification says, but about purity and wholesomeness of design... :)
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
From my understanding (and after reading the example Bob referred to), the difference is:
[referring to external id] <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" />
[inline text] dwc:recordedBySteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy>
Look right?
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Jim Croft Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 9:37 a.m. To: Bob Morris Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Hi Bob - should the same term allow both types of content, or should there be a different term for each? Does it matter? Should applications be smart enough to tell the difference and know what to do with it?
Not really asking what the specification says, but about purity and wholesomeness of design... :)
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.' - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963) _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
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wondering if dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> is legit?
just a have your cake and eat it kinda guy...
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 7:41 AM, Kevin Richards RichardsK@landcareresearch.co.nz wrote:
From my understanding (and after reading the example Bob referred to), the difference is:
[referring to external id] <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" />
[inline text] dwc:recordedBySteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy>
Look right?
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Jim Croft Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 9:37 a.m. To: Bob Morris Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Hi Bob - should the same term allow both types of content, or should there be a different term for each? Does it matter? Should applications be smart enough to tell the difference and know what to do with it?
Not really asking what the specification says, but about purity and wholesomeness of design... :)
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.' - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963) _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
Please consider the environment before printing this email Warning: This electronic message together with any attachments is confidential. If you receive it in error: (i) you must not read, use, disclose, copy or retain it; (ii) please contact the sender immediately by reply email and then delete the emails. The views expressed in this email may not be those of Landcare Research New Zealand Limited. http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz
That isn't correct RDF/XML as far as I know, but the following two options are...
dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"</dwc:recordedBy> rdf:Description rdf:about="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"rdfs:labelSteve Baskauf</rdfs:label></rdf:Description>
and (because the ontology doesn't tell you URIs are required)
dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"</dwc:recordedBy> dwc:recordedBySteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy>
On 20 May 2010 07:57, Jim Croft jim.croft@gmail.com wrote:
wondering if dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> is legit?
just a have your cake and eat it kinda guy...
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 7:41 AM, Kevin Richards RichardsK@landcareresearch.co.nz wrote:
From my understanding (and after reading the example Bob referred to), the difference is:
[referring to external id] <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" />
[inline text] dwc:recordedBySteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy>
Look right?
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Jim Croft Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 9:37 a.m. To: Bob Morris Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Hi Bob - should the same term allow both types of content, or should there be a different term for each? Does it matter? Should applications be smart enough to tell the difference and know what to do with it?
Not really asking what the specification says, but about purity and wholesomeness of design... :)
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.' - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963) _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
Please consider the environment before printing this email Warning: This electronic message together with any attachments is confidential. If you receive it in error: (i) you must not read, use, disclose, copy or retain it; (ii) please contact the sender immediately by reply email and then delete the emails. The views expressed in this email may not be those of Landcare Research New Zealand Limited. http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.' - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963) _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
In the specific case of RDF, having your cake and eating it doesn't work. Paste this:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me%22%3ESteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
into the W3C RDF validator at: http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/ and it will tell you "The attributes on this property element, are not permitted with any content; expecting end element tag.". So in RDF elements having the rdf:resource attribute have to be empty elements. I tried validating an example where the recordedBy property was included twice, once with a URI object and once with a string literal object. It validated as "good" RDF, but I think it would be confusing to a linked data client that would really have no clue that both objects represented the same thing and would probably "assume" that the occurrence was recorded by two entities rather than one..
A possible solution would be to use dcterms:description as another attribute. dcterms:description is defined as "An account of the resource. Description may include ...a free-text account of the resource." I couldn't find a more appropriate Dublin Core to use as an attribute. So running this example:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" dcterms:description="Steve Baskauf" /> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
through the validator shows that this RDF asserts the following triples: http://herbarium.org/hb123456 dwc:recordedBy http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me and that http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me dcterms:description "Steve Baskauf"
In other words, the occurrence was recorded by me (identified by my URI) and that the description of the thing represented by my URI is "Steve Baskauf". That is pretty much a correct representation of the situation, although the whole point of using a URI as the object of a property is for a client to dereference the URI to find out more about the object. The FOAF file (pointed to by the URI) would provide that information without the dcterms:description attribute.
Steve
Jim Croft wrote:
wondering if dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> is legit?
just a have your cake and eat it kinda guy...
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 7:41 AM, Kevin Richards RichardsK@landcareresearch.co.nz wrote:
From my understanding (and after reading the example Bob referred to), the difference is:
[referring to external id] <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" />
[inline text] dwc:recordedBySteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy>
Look right?
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Jim Croft Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 9:37 a.m. To: Bob Morris Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Hi Bob - should the same term allow both types of content, or should there be a different term for each? Does it matter? Should applications be smart enough to tell the difference and know what to do with it?
Not really asking what the specification says, but about purity and wholesomeness of design... :)
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.'
- Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
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As Peter Ansell points out, another solution seems to be to use two dwc:recordedBy elements:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ <dwc:recordedBy >Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> </dwc:Occurrence>
I don't think the parse error is about the use of rdf:resource per se. I must confess that I'm having trouble understanding how to conclude from the RDF spec why the original is a parse error, but these things usually can be understood by trying to show what the triples are, not by staring at the spec for some rdf tag. I'm finding RDF/XML increasingly irksome and unpleasant in this kind of task. If one unwinds it here, I bet it is that your failing example has subject "http://herbarium.org/hb123456", predicate dwc:recordedBy but is trying to have two objects.
The fact that you want to associate the URI for you with the string for you is probably a separate problem, and possibly not expressible within dwc itself.
Bob
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 8:59 PM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
In the specific case of RDF, having your cake and eating it doesn't work. Paste this:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
into the W3C RDF validator at: http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/ and it will tell you "The attributes on this property element, are not permitted with any content; expecting end element tag.". So in RDF elements having the rdf:resource attribute have to be empty elements. I tried validating an example where the recordedBy property was included twice, once with a URI object and once with a string literal object. It validated as "good" RDF, but I think it would be confusing to a linked data client that would really have no clue that both objects represented the same thing and would probably "assume" that the occurrence was recorded by two entities rather than one..
A possible solution would be to use dcterms:description as another attribute. dcterms:description is defined as "An account of the resource. Description may include ...a free-text account of the resource." I couldn't find a more appropriate Dublin Core to use as an attribute. So running this example:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" dcterms:description="Steve Baskauf" /> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
through the validator shows that this RDF asserts the following triples: http://herbarium.org/hb123456%C2%A0 dwc:recordedBy http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me and that http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me dcterms:description "Steve Baskauf"
In other words, the occurrence was recorded by me (identified by my URI) and that the description of the thing represented by my URI is "Steve Baskauf". That is pretty much a correct representation of the situation, although the whole point of using a URI as the object of a property is for a client to dereference the URI to find out more about the object. The FOAF file (pointed to by the URI) would provide that information without the dcterms:description attribute.
Steve
Jim Croft wrote:
wondering if dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> is legit?
just a have your cake and eat it kinda guy...
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 7:41 AM, Kevin Richards RichardsK@landcareresearch.co.nz wrote:
From my understanding (and after reading the example Bob referred to), the difference is:
[referring to external id] <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" />
[inline text] dwc:recordedBySteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy>
Look right?
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Jim Croft Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 9:37 a.m. To: Bob Morris Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Hi Bob - should the same term allow both types of content, or should there be a different term for each? Does it matter? Should applications be smart enough to tell the difference and know what to do with it?
Not really asking what the specification says, but about purity and wholesomeness of design... :)
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.' - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963) _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
Please consider the environment before printing this email Warning: This electronic message together with any attachments is confidential. If you receive it in error: (i) you must not read, use, disclose, copy or retain it; (ii) please contact the sender immediately by reply email and then delete the emails. The views expressed in this email may not be those of Landcare Research New Zealand Limited. http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
Dear all,
Sorry to have to jump in to the discussion late. I'm just back out of the field in Jujuy where the winds took out the little connectivity that once existed.
I'm stepping back to the beginning of the conversation, out of the RDF representation issue, which seems to reasonable resolved under the thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes."
The Darwin Core terms Steve has brought to attention are among a larger set (relationshipAccordingTo, georeferencedBy, measurementDeterminedBy, recordedBy, identifiedBy) that all are intended to cover the real world situation of data coming out of database fields for which there was no sense of persistent global unique identification. They were meant for literal strings for dcterms:Agents. There is nothing to proscribe the use of URIs in these fields. However, though there has been a lot of discussion about how one might represent the URI and string literal information about the recordedBy Agent, there has been no statement of consensus in the TAG from discussions in this thread and the related thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes" about whether actionable GUIDs for these same concepts should have their own terms.
As I see it, we got this far:
In the thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes" Rod Page said:
"If you want a literal for dwc:recordedBy (say for ease of display) then I think you want a different tag that is expressly defined to do just that. For example, http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonOccurrence has <identifiedTo> to point to a URI for a taxon, and <identifiedToString> if you want the literal. I don't know if dwc has anything equivalent for recordedBy (and can somebody please tell me why we now have so many vocabularies for the same things?)"
I think what Rod proposes is cleaner than using the same term for two purposes, as much as I too would like to have my cake and eat it. I agree with Rod, except that dwc:recordedBy is the string literal version of the concept, and no URI version (something like dwc:recordedByID refines dcterms:identifier) currently exists. Up to now there has not been a need expressed, hence, no such term was included in DwC.
In answer to Rod's last question, we have many vocabularies (unfinished attempts), but only one that is is a ratified standard. That standard isn't an ontology, nor is it complete in describing best practices for expressing information in all representations. It's reasonably clear for how to share information in text files, and about the recommendations for XML, but in terms of RDF it is silent, awaiting the badly needed ontology work.
Reviewing DwC in light of these discussions, I noted the following:
1) The set of terms (relationshipAccordingTo, georeferencedBy, measurementDeterminedBy, recordedBy, identifiedBy) all currently refine an abstract term dwc:accordingTo, defined as "Abstract term to attribute information to a source." This refinement doesn't really do anything useful in my opinion. I think the term dwc:accordingTo should be dropped, and the terms listed above should instead refine dcterms:contributor.
2) For one of these concepts (nameAccordingTo) it was anticipated that there would be actionable GUIDs and the term nameAccordingToID was added to clarify the distinction. nameAccordingTo currently also refines dwc:accordingTo, but I think this is erroneous, as it is meant to refer to a publication, not to a dcterms:Agent. This problem will be resolved if dwc:accordingTo is dropped and nameAccordingTo is changed to have no refines value.
3) In cases where actionable GUIDs were anticipated to be commonly used, terms with names ending with "ID" were added specifically for this purpose (relatedResourceID, resourceID, resourceRelationshipID, higherGeographyID, parentNameUsageID, nameAccordingToID, originalNameUsageID, eventID, individualID, occurrenceID, geologicalContextID, namePublishedInID, measurementID, acceptedNameUsageID, scientificNameID, locationID, identificationID, datasetID, taxonConceptID, taxonID). All of these terms refine dcterms:identifier and many of them are examples illustrating Rod's recommendation to separate identifiers from string literal representations of the concepts. If it is deemed that further "ID" terms are needed, then a public discussion must take place on the tdwg-content list.
Dropping dwc:accordingTo, and changing the refinements requires the procedure under section 3.3 of the Darwin Core Namespace Policy (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm#classesofchanges). I'll follow the protocol for changes for items 1 and 2 above, and await further discussion on item 3.
Cheers,
John
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
As Peter Ansell points out, another solution seems to be to use two dwc:recordedBy elements:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ <dwc:recordedBy >Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> </dwc:Occurrence>
I don't think the parse error is about the use of rdf:resource per se. I must confess that I'm having trouble understanding how to conclude from the RDF spec why the original is a parse error, but these things usually can be understood by trying to show what the triples are, not by staring at the spec for some rdf tag. I'm finding RDF/XML increasingly irksome and unpleasant in this kind of task. If one unwinds it here, I bet it is that your failing example has subject "http://herbarium.org/hb123456", predicate dwc:recordedBy but is trying to have two objects.
The fact that you want to associate the URI for you with the string for you is probably a separate problem, and possibly not expressible within dwc itself.
Bob
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 8:59 PM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
In the specific case of RDF, having your cake and eating it doesn't work. Paste this:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
into the W3C RDF validator at: http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/ and it will tell you "The attributes on this property element, are not permitted with any content; expecting end element tag.". So in RDF elements having the rdf:resource attribute have to be empty elements. I tried validating an example where the recordedBy property was included twice, once with a URI object and once with a string literal object. It validated as "good" RDF, but I think it would be confusing to a linked data client that would really have no clue that both objects represented the same thing and would probably "assume" that the occurrence was recorded by two entities rather than one..
A possible solution would be to use dcterms:description as another attribute. dcterms:description is defined as "An account of the resource. Description may include ...a free-text account of the resource." I couldn't find a more appropriate Dublin Core to use as an attribute. So running this example:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" dcterms:description="Steve Baskauf" /> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
through the validator shows that this RDF asserts the following triples: http://herbarium.org/hb123456%C2%A0 dwc:recordedBy http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me and that http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me dcterms:description "Steve Baskauf"
In other words, the occurrence was recorded by me (identified by my URI) and that the description of the thing represented by my URI is "Steve Baskauf". That is pretty much a correct representation of the situation, although the whole point of using a URI as the object of a property is for a client to dereference the URI to find out more about the object. The FOAF file (pointed to by the URI) would provide that information without the dcterms:description attribute.
Steve
Jim Croft wrote:
wondering if dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> is legit?
just a have your cake and eat it kinda guy...
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 7:41 AM, Kevin Richards RichardsK@landcareresearch.co.nz wrote:
From my understanding (and after reading the example Bob referred to), the difference is:
[referring to external id] <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" />
[inline text] dwc:recordedBySteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy>
Look right?
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Jim Croft Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 9:37 a.m. To: Bob Morris Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Hi Bob - should the same term allow both types of content, or should there be a different term for each? Does it matter? Should applications be smart enough to tell the difference and know what to do with it?
Not really asking what the specification says, but about purity and wholesomeness of design... :)
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.' - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963) _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
Please consider the environment before printing this email Warning: This electronic message together with any attachments is confidential. If you receive it in error: (i) you must not read, use, disclose, copy or retain it; (ii) please contact the sender immediately by reply email and then delete the emails. The views expressed in this email may not be those of Landcare Research New Zealand Limited. http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
While making the case on for tdwg-content about dropping dwc:accordingTo a couple of things occurred to me. One is that dwc:accordingTo fills a role that isn't found in Dublin Core and was the reason I came up with it in the first place. The term is meant to signify a source for the information, and that the source might be a dcterms:Agent or it might be a publication. relationshipAccordingTo might be either on of these. nameAccordingTo really is supposed to be a publication. georeferencedBy was intended to be an Agent, but I can see how the agent might be lost to knowledge, but the publication that was the source isn't. None of the dcterms (creator, contributor, provenance, source) covers this more generic idea of an authority. Well, that was the idea behind dwc:accordingTo. The big question is, "Is the role useful?"
The second thing that occurred to me is that getting rid of the term is a lot of work compared to not getting rid of it, so if it is doing no harm, shouldn't it just be left alone? That's what I intend to do now rather than go through the excision process.
However, one of the most recent terms, dwc:locationAccordingTo is not a refinement of dwc:accordingTo. For consistency, if dwc:accordingTo is retained, dwc:locationAccordingTo should refine it. I will make that change as having been an oversight unless there is any opposition.
On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 8:45 AM, John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote:
Dear all,
Sorry to have to jump in to the discussion late. I'm just back out of the field in Jujuy where the winds took out the little connectivity that once existed.
I'm stepping back to the beginning of the conversation, out of the RDF representation issue, which seems to reasonable resolved under the thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes."
The Darwin Core terms Steve has brought to attention are among a larger set (relationshipAccordingTo, georeferencedBy, measurementDeterminedBy, recordedBy, identifiedBy) that all are intended to cover the real world situation of data coming out of database fields for which there was no sense of persistent global unique identification. They were meant for literal strings for dcterms:Agents. There is nothing to proscribe the use of URIs in these fields. However, though there has been a lot of discussion about how one might represent the URI and string literal information about the recordedBy Agent, there has been no statement of consensus in the TAG from discussions in this thread and the related thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes" about whether actionable GUIDs for these same concepts should have their own terms.
As I see it, we got this far:
In the thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes" Rod Page said:
"If you want a literal for dwc:recordedBy (say for ease of display) then I think you want a different tag that is expressly defined to do just that. For example, http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonOccurrence has <identifiedTo> to point to a URI for a taxon, and <identifiedToString> if you want the literal. I don't know if dwc has anything equivalent for recordedBy (and can somebody please tell me why we now have so many vocabularies for the same things?)"
I think what Rod proposes is cleaner than using the same term for two purposes, as much as I too would like to have my cake and eat it. I agree with Rod, except that dwc:recordedBy is the string literal version of the concept, and no URI version (something like dwc:recordedByID refines dcterms:identifier) currently exists. Up to now there has not been a need expressed, hence, no such term was included in DwC.
In answer to Rod's last question, we have many vocabularies (unfinished attempts), but only one that is is a ratified standard. That standard isn't an ontology, nor is it complete in describing best practices for expressing information in all representations. It's reasonably clear for how to share information in text files, and about the recommendations for XML, but in terms of RDF it is silent, awaiting the badly needed ontology work.
Reviewing DwC in light of these discussions, I noted the following:
- The set of terms (relationshipAccordingTo, georeferencedBy,
measurementDeterminedBy, recordedBy, identifiedBy) all currently refine an abstract term dwc:accordingTo, defined as "Abstract term to attribute information to a source." This refinement doesn't really do anything useful in my opinion. I think the term dwc:accordingTo should be dropped, and the terms listed above should instead refine dcterms:contributor.
- For one of these concepts (nameAccordingTo) it was anticipated that
there would be actionable GUIDs and the term nameAccordingToID was added to clarify the distinction. nameAccordingTo currently also refines dwc:accordingTo, but I think this is erroneous, as it is meant to refer to a publication, not to a dcterms:Agent. This problem will be resolved if dwc:accordingTo is dropped and nameAccordingTo is changed to have no refines value.
- In cases where actionable GUIDs were anticipated to be commonly
used, terms with names ending with "ID" were added specifically for this purpose (relatedResourceID, resourceID, resourceRelationshipID, higherGeographyID, parentNameUsageID, nameAccordingToID, originalNameUsageID, eventID, individualID, occurrenceID, geologicalContextID, namePublishedInID, measurementID, acceptedNameUsageID, scientificNameID, locationID, identificationID, datasetID, taxonConceptID, taxonID). All of these terms refine dcterms:identifier and many of them are examples illustrating Rod's recommendation to separate identifiers from string literal representations of the concepts. If it is deemed that further "ID" terms are needed, then a public discussion must take place on the tdwg-content list.
Dropping dwc:accordingTo, and changing the refinements requires the procedure under section 3.3 of the Darwin Core Namespace Policy (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm#classesofchanges). I'll follow the protocol for changes for items 1 and 2 above, and await further discussion on item 3.
Cheers,
John
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
As Peter Ansell points out, another solution seems to be to use two dwc:recordedBy elements:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ <dwc:recordedBy >Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> </dwc:Occurrence>
I don't think the parse error is about the use of rdf:resource per se. I must confess that I'm having trouble understanding how to conclude from the RDF spec why the original is a parse error, but these things usually can be understood by trying to show what the triples are, not by staring at the spec for some rdf tag. I'm finding RDF/XML increasingly irksome and unpleasant in this kind of task. If one unwinds it here, I bet it is that your failing example has subject "http://herbarium.org/hb123456", predicate dwc:recordedBy but is trying to have two objects.
The fact that you want to associate the URI for you with the string for you is probably a separate problem, and possibly not expressible within dwc itself.
Bob
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 8:59 PM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
In the specific case of RDF, having your cake and eating it doesn't work. Paste this:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
into the W3C RDF validator at: http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/ and it will tell you "The attributes on this property element, are not permitted with any content; expecting end element tag.". So in RDF elements having the rdf:resource attribute have to be empty elements. I tried validating an example where the recordedBy property was included twice, once with a URI object and once with a string literal object. It validated as "good" RDF, but I think it would be confusing to a linked data client that would really have no clue that both objects represented the same thing and would probably "assume" that the occurrence was recorded by two entities rather than one..
A possible solution would be to use dcterms:description as another attribute. dcterms:description is defined as "An account of the resource. Description may include ...a free-text account of the resource." I couldn't find a more appropriate Dublin Core to use as an attribute. So running this example:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" dcterms:description="Steve Baskauf" /> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
through the validator shows that this RDF asserts the following triples: http://herbarium.org/hb123456%C2%A0 dwc:recordedBy http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me and that http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me dcterms:description "Steve Baskauf"
In other words, the occurrence was recorded by me (identified by my URI) and that the description of the thing represented by my URI is "Steve Baskauf". That is pretty much a correct representation of the situation, although the whole point of using a URI as the object of a property is for a client to dereference the URI to find out more about the object. The FOAF file (pointed to by the URI) would provide that information without the dcterms:description attribute.
Steve
Jim Croft wrote:
wondering if dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> is legit?
just a have your cake and eat it kinda guy...
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 7:41 AM, Kevin Richards RichardsK@landcareresearch.co.nz wrote:
From my understanding (and after reading the example Bob referred to), the difference is:
[referring to external id] <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" />
[inline text] dwc:recordedBySteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy>
Look right?
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Jim Croft Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 9:37 a.m. To: Bob Morris Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Hi Bob - should the same term allow both types of content, or should there be a different term for each? Does it matter? Should applications be smart enough to tell the difference and know what to do with it?
Not really asking what the specification says, but about purity and wholesomeness of design... :)
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.' - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963) _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
Please consider the environment before printing this email Warning: This electronic message together with any attachments is confidential. If you receive it in error: (i) you must not read, use, disclose, copy or retain it; (ii) please contact the sender immediately by reply email and then delete the emails. The views expressed in this email may not be those of Landcare Research New Zealand Limited. http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
John et al., I would cast a vote in favor of adding the "ID" forms for dwc:recordedBy, etc.(i.e. dwc:recordedByID). This would provide a straightforward and semantically clear way of differentiating between the string literal and URI forms of the terms. I think that this is particularly important if the existing terms are intended to be used with string literals.
In addition to the clarity that this would add, it would also make use of the metadata easier. Earlier in one of the threads, I mentioned using the RDF file associated with a GUID as a data source for creating XHTML for the human-readable representation through XSLT or AJAX. I have been playing around with this idea a little bit. In the source RDF file: http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/66921.rdf I applied the suggestion we discussed of representing the terms such as dwc:recordedBy as URIs, then labeling the URIs by using the label property in a description about the URI. I am a novice XSLT user, so there may be a much more straightforward method, but in my test: http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/xml/image-generic.xsl which transforms the RDF file to XHTML, it was a pain extracting the label data from the other Description elements to get the text representation of the terms. In contrast, it would have been a very simple and straightforward matter to create the clickable hyperlinks I desired if the string and URI versions had been recorded as separate terms. (The end result of the XSLT is used in a test XHTML file using Javascript http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/metadata-test.htm?baskauf/66921/metadata/img where you can see the clickable links I'm talking about. Eventually when I'm done testing, the XHTML will be used for GUID resolution as in http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/66921)
I think that if creating an RDF/XML representation is going to be a requirement for issuing GUIDs, then facilitating this kind of use would be a good thing. I'm still waiting to see any real use of those RDF data by Linked Data clients, whereas using the RDF/XML for XSLT or AJAX has a clear benefit right now.
Steve
John Wieczorek wrote:
Dear all,
Sorry to have to jump in to the discussion late. I'm just back out of the field in Jujuy where the winds took out the little connectivity that once existed.
I'm stepping back to the beginning of the conversation, out of the RDF representation issue, which seems to reasonable resolved under the thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes."
The Darwin Core terms Steve has brought to attention are among a larger set (relationshipAccordingTo, georeferencedBy, measurementDeterminedBy, recordedBy, identifiedBy) that all are intended to cover the real world situation of data coming out of database fields for which there was no sense of persistent global unique identification. They were meant for literal strings for dcterms:Agents. There is nothing to proscribe the use of URIs in these fields. However, though there has been a lot of discussion about how one might represent the URI and string literal information about the recordedBy Agent, there has been no statement of consensus in the TAG from discussions in this thread and the related thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes" about whether actionable GUIDs for these same concepts should have their own terms.
As I see it, we got this far:
In the thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes" Rod Page said:
"If you want a literal for dwc:recordedBy (say for ease of display) then I think you want a different tag that is expressly defined to do just that. For example, http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonOccurrence has <identifiedTo> to point to a URI for a taxon, and <identifiedToString> if you want the literal. I don't know if dwc has anything equivalent for recordedBy (and can somebody please tell me why we now have so many vocabularies for the same things?)"
I think what Rod proposes is cleaner than using the same term for two purposes, as much as I too would like to have my cake and eat it. I agree with Rod, except that dwc:recordedBy is the string literal version of the concept, and no URI version (something like dwc:recordedByID refines dcterms:identifier) currently exists. Up to now there has not been a need expressed, hence, no such term was included in DwC.
In answer to Rod's last question, we have many vocabularies (unfinished attempts), but only one that is is a ratified standard. That standard isn't an ontology, nor is it complete in describing best practices for expressing information in all representations. It's reasonably clear for how to share information in text files, and about the recommendations for XML, but in terms of RDF it is silent, awaiting the badly needed ontology work.
Reviewing DwC in light of these discussions, I noted the following:
- The set of terms (relationshipAccordingTo, georeferencedBy,
measurementDeterminedBy, recordedBy, identifiedBy) all currently refine an abstract term dwc:accordingTo, defined as "Abstract term to attribute information to a source." This refinement doesn't really do anything useful in my opinion. I think the term dwc:accordingTo should be dropped, and the terms listed above should instead refine dcterms:contributor.
- For one of these concepts (nameAccordingTo) it was anticipated that
there would be actionable GUIDs and the term nameAccordingToID was added to clarify the distinction. nameAccordingTo currently also refines dwc:accordingTo, but I think this is erroneous, as it is meant to refer to a publication, not to a dcterms:Agent. This problem will be resolved if dwc:accordingTo is dropped and nameAccordingTo is changed to have no refines value.
- In cases where actionable GUIDs were anticipated to be commonly
used, terms with names ending with "ID" were added specifically for this purpose (relatedResourceID, resourceID, resourceRelationshipID, higherGeographyID, parentNameUsageID, nameAccordingToID, originalNameUsageID, eventID, individualID, occurrenceID, geologicalContextID, namePublishedInID, measurementID, acceptedNameUsageID, scientificNameID, locationID, identificationID, datasetID, taxonConceptID, taxonID). All of these terms refine dcterms:identifier and many of them are examples illustrating Rod's recommendation to separate identifiers from string literal representations of the concepts. If it is deemed that further "ID" terms are needed, then a public discussion must take place on the tdwg-content list.
Dropping dwc:accordingTo, and changing the refinements requires the procedure under section 3.3 of the Darwin Core Namespace Policy (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm#classesofchanges). I'll follow the protocol for changes for items 1 and 2 above, and await further discussion on item 3.
Cheers,
John
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
As Peter Ansell points out, another solution seems to be to use two dwc:recordedBy elements:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ <dwc:recordedBy >Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> </dwc:Occurrence>
I don't think the parse error is about the use of rdf:resource per se. I must confess that I'm having trouble understanding how to conclude from the RDF spec why the original is a parse error, but these things usually can be understood by trying to show what the triples are, not by staring at the spec for some rdf tag. I'm finding RDF/XML increasingly irksome and unpleasant in this kind of task. If one unwinds it here, I bet it is that your failing example has subject "http://herbarium.org/hb123456", predicate dwc:recordedBy but is trying to have two objects.
The fact that you want to associate the URI for you with the string for you is probably a separate problem, and possibly not expressible within dwc itself.
Bob
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 8:59 PM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
In the specific case of RDF, having your cake and eating it doesn't work. Paste this:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
into the W3C RDF validator at: http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/ and it will tell you "The attributes on this property element, are not permitted with any content; expecting end element tag.". So in RDF elements having the rdf:resource attribute have to be empty elements. I tried validating an example where the recordedBy property was included twice, once with a URI object and once with a string literal object. It validated as "good" RDF, but I think it would be confusing to a linked data client that would really have no clue that both objects represented the same thing and would probably "assume" that the occurrence was recorded by two entities rather than one..
A possible solution would be to use dcterms:description as another attribute. dcterms:description is defined as "An account of the resource. Description may include ...a free-text account of the resource." I couldn't find a more appropriate Dublin Core to use as an attribute. So running this example:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/" > <dwc:Occurrence rdf:about="http://herbarium.org/hb123456%22%3E <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" dcterms:description="Steve Baskauf" /> </dwc:Occurrence> </rdf:RDF>
through the validator shows that this RDF asserts the following triples: http://herbarium.org/hb123456 dwc:recordedBy http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me and that http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me dcterms:description "Steve Baskauf"
In other words, the occurrence was recorded by me (identified by my URI) and that the description of the thing represented by my URI is "Steve Baskauf". That is pretty much a correct representation of the situation, although the whole point of using a URI as the object of a property is for a client to dereference the URI to find out more about the object. The FOAF file (pointed to by the URI) would provide that information without the dcterms:description attribute.
Steve
Jim Croft wrote:
wondering if dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"Steve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> is legit?
just a have your cake and eat it kinda guy...
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 7:41 AM, Kevin Richards RichardsK@landcareresearch.co.nz wrote:
From my understanding (and after reading the example Bob referred to), the difference is:
[referring to external id] <dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me" />
[inline text] dwc:recordedBySteve Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy>
Look right?
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Jim Croft Sent: Thursday, 20 May 2010 9:37 a.m. To: Bob Morris Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] string literals vs. uris for dwc:recordedBy, dwc:identifiedBy, and dwc:georeferencedBy in RDF
Hi Bob - should the same term allow both types of content, or should there be a different term for each? Does it matter? Should applications be smart enough to tell the difference and know what to do with it?
Not really asking what the specification says, but about purity and wholesomeness of design... :)
jim
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly this example is given in http://web4.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#section-Syntax-property-attributes so I would find it regrettable if DwC does something somewhere that makes this substitution impossible or discouraged, or encourages tool construction that does so, or encourages documention be interpreted in a way that does so.
Indeed http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf defines its type to be rdf:Property and is silent on any semantics but that. My own conclusion is that neither the intent or the outcome of the rdf version of dwcterms discourages what you want, though I suppose the intent part would be clearer if the documentation also said that a URI can always be used, but applications are responsible for interpreting it.
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition for the Darwin Core term recordedBy http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy says "A list (concatenated and separated) of names ...". The examples given are string literals. However, when using this term as a predicate in RDF, it would seem preferable to use a URI to an RDF representation of the entity (if one exists) rather than a string literal. For example, can I use: dwc:recordedBy rdf:resource="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/foaf.rdf#me"/ rather than dwc:recordedBySteven J. Baskauf</dwc:recordedBy> ?
Steve Baskauf
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.'
- Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
Please consider the environment before printing this email Warning: This electronic message together with any attachments is confidential. If you receive it in error: (i) you must not read, use, disclose, copy or retain it; (ii) please contact the sender immediately by reply email and then delete the emails. The views expressed in this email may not be those of Landcare Research New Zealand Limited. http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: ram@cs.umb.edu web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1)617 287 6466 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
.
participants (6)
-
Bob Morris -
Jim Croft -
John Wieczorek -
Kevin Richards -
Peter Ansell -
Steve Baskauf