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Hi Folks
For info, as Steve mentioned we (Rob, Robert and me)have been working on a draft ontology for TDWG that the subgroups were involved in and which was reported briefly at the last GUID meeting. The agreement was to present the results of this at TDWG after we did some testing in a mini project over the summer to see how usable it was.
We're still finishing off the documentation and no doubt there will be things to discuss and changes to be made to the ontology but if you really want to look at the ontology (in OWL) we used in the project you can see it at http://tdwg.napier.ac.uk/ontology/ We had UML diagrams of the design - which I need to check to make sure they are in agreement with the OWL, but you can look at the UML diagrams on http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/TDWGOntology unfortunately these don't go down to the level of detail being discussed and it is our domain ontology that really lets you represent for example an actual name. We'll make the some sample RDF available in due course with the software.
See you all at TDWG - hopefully with everything documented by then ;-)
Jessie
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:tdwg-guid- bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Perry Sent: 26 September 2006 15:16 To: S.Hinchcliffe@kew.org Cc: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Jena examples?
Hi Sally,
No problem. The task was to create a prototype LSID resolver, not to solve all the KR issues surrounding taxon concepts. However, I do
think
it's time we start talking about these issues. I worry that the prototype resolvers we set up will become de facto reference implementations, that other people will start to construct services modeled on the prototypes without us ever having gone back to talk
about
what worked and what didn't.
I know there are several versions of TCS-in-RDF floating around. I think Roger's is an RDFS document. Rob Gales created an OWL-DL
version
for the GBIF demonstration project that Jessie and he worked on this summer. Early this year I created a partial implementation in
OWL-Lite
(that I've since discarded). While each one is "TCS", they're all substantially different in the way they represent TCS classes and properties, in part because the different representation languages (RDFS, OWL-Lite, OWL-DL) have different language features and
expressive
powers.
It would be nice if we could devise one standard RDF implementation of TCS. I don't care which one we use, but I would like to narrow the field to one so we can get the details sorted out. I'm talking about details like resolvable namespaces, typed versus non-typed literals,
the
use of anonymous resources, and serialization issues like the references-to-resources problem that cropped up in the IPNI example Peter Hollas is working from. These details are quite important
because
certain decisions taken here can effect the larger network of linked data providers.
Take the anonymous resources issues: If you look at the example Peter cites, the typifiedBy property refers to an anonymous
NomenclaturalType
that has a dc:title. Within a single data provider, this is no big
deal
because many different data objects can refer to this NomenclaturalType. However the use of anonymous resources can cause
big
problems when you try to harvest and index the data from multiple providers. It also causes problems for the caching use case.
It would be nice to discuss some of these things, perhaps within TAG.
-Steve
Sally Hinchcliffe wrote:
Hi Steve /all
We took that syntax straight from Roger's RDF/TCS examples. I think Roger was going to do more work on tidying up those sorts of loose ends. I have to admit that my knowledge of RDF and particularly RDFS is pretty superficial
We can switch to either the shorter format or the safer fully qualified URI - what do people think would be better?
Sally
By the way, the IPNI example you cite has an error:
<tn:nomenclaturalCode rdf:resource="&tn;#botanical" />
Many RDF/XML parsers will see &tn; as an entity which cannot be resolved. Since I don't have a copy of the ontology (and http://tdwg.org/2006/03/12/TaxonNames does not resolve), I can only
take
a guess that it should look something like:
<tn:nomenclaturalCode rdf:resource="tn:botanical" />
However, using XML namespace prefixes in resource references inside RDF/XML documents tends to cause problems because not all RDF/XML parsers are smart enough to dereference the namespace prefix and
build
a
fully-qualified resource URI. A safer form of the above would be
the
fully qualified resource URI which looks like:
<tn:nomenclaturalCode
rdf:resource="http://tdwg.org/2006/03/12/TaxonNames/botanical" />
-Steve
*** Sally Hinchcliffe *** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew *** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708 *** S.Hinchcliffe@rbgkew.org.uk
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Kennedy, Jessie