[tdwg-content] assertions in DwC terms

[John R. WIECZOREK]

No, this one isn't appropriate for the issue tracker because it is in
the discussion stage, in that there is no definitive solution to
propose yet. There are a couple of quick answers to why have the
domains for the property terms. The first s organization of the
standard. The domains help organize the properties in ways that help
people to understand their meaning and purpose. Some of them have no
domain because they could apply to multiple domains, but they are few
in number. The second reason for the domain assignments is that we
lack a formal ontology, and this is an attempt to have one to govern
at least the terms within this standard.

What is the potentially problematic future case of asserting that a
specimen is an dwcterms:Occurrence? It is one.

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 5:31 PM, Hilmar Lapp<hlapp at duke.edu> wrote:
> The current DwC Terms version (at http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf)
>  defines the domain for (at least some) object properties.
>
> Unless I am missing something this means that when I use DwC Terms for
> properties I implicitly assert the class of the subject, which means
> that either I can use DwC terms only for subjects of the type they are
> intended for (and why would one want to limit DwC's use in this way?),
> or reasoning based on RDF or OWL extractions of leads to problems.
>
> For example, in the Phenoscape project [1] we would like to link
> characters, states, or OTUs to the specimens based on which a
> systematist defined a (or all) character(s) or state(s). The specimens
> would be described in a NeXML document [2] with embedded RDFa
> annotation by institutionCode, collectionCode, and catalogNumber. The
> RDF extracted from that when run in a reasoner (which we will do)
> would implicitly assert that the specimen is a DwCTerms:Occurrence.
> Right now that probably doesn't hurt much in this case, but it might
> in the future, and I'm not sure what is gained from forcing those
> implicit assertions in the vocabulary.
>
> Should I post this as an issue to the tracker on Google Code, too?
>
>        -hilmar
>
> [1] http://phenoscape.org
> [2] http://nexml.org
>
> --
> ===========================================================
> : Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
> ===========================================================
>
>
>
>
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