I don't know how many of you are working with Semantic Web technologies, but I did a talk at the2008 Meeting of the Entomological Society of America Meeting in Reno.
You can see it here : http://esa.confex.com/esa/2008/webprogram/Paper39190.html
One of the issues that I have been struggling with is the need for a unique identifier for a species concept that stays the same despite changes in taxonomic hypotheses. When I brought this up earlier some mentioned that many considered the taxonomic hypothesis to be the species concept.
I thought that this approach was wrong because it unnecessarily required me to convince one of my collaborators to adopt my taxonomic hypothesis when it was clear we were talking about the same species.
To me a species is a real thing to which different taxonomic hypothesis are applied.
With this in mind I implemented a system where each species has a unique URI which resolves according to the recommendations of the linked data community.
You can see this service at: http://species.geospecies.org/
Here is the page for Culicidae http://species.geospecies.org/families/Culicidae
Here is an example of the URI for Aedes vexans
http://species.geospecies.org/spec_concept_uuid/0fcb5b7e-bcfc-4b56-b565-e1e3...
For a web browser this will resolve to the human readable page, for a semantic web crawler it will respond with RDF data.
Here is journal reference marked up using the two major bibliography ontologies that includes what species concepts are included in the article. This allows publications to retain links to species concepts despite changes in nomenclature.
http://rdf.geospecies.org/refs/sucaet2008wbr/index.rdf
Here is an RDF file of species observation records (the web version is currently password protected)
http://rdf.geospecies.org/observations/index.rdf
I have chosen the UUID as the mechanism to make unique URI's not because of their inherent beauty, but because the allow anyone on almost any platform to create a unique id without worrying about to identical id's being created.
For those interested, I can send you a PDF of my talk slides and text.
I would also appreciate any feedback or suggestions :-)
- Pete
--------------------------------------------------------------- Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 Email: pdevries@wisc.edu Insects of Wisconsin http://insects.entomology.wisc.edu/ Spiders of Wisconsin http://spiders.entomology.wisc.edu/ ------------------------------------------------------------