[tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking

Peter DeVries pete.devries at gmail.com
Thu Jun 10 23:18:21 CEST 2010


I should have probably been more clear that what I had stated previously was
a bit of a rhetorical question.

There had been a species concept id in an earlier version of the DarwinCore.

I was checking out this page and noticed that it was gone.

http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Taxon

<http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Taxon>It seems to have been either
deleted or replaced with what I call "nameID's"

I have been working with the EOL Woods Hole group looking at ways that names
can be connected to concepts as part of the GNI.

We have a sample set of about 70,000 species that have the following kinds
of mappings:

1) basic mapping to lexical variants in the GNI
2) basic mapping to other related semantic web identifier that have a
"similar" meaning
3) Basic mapping to foreign key identifiers in various databases
4) A place in the RDF for mapping the species concept to various
publications

In the future, I would like to add additional information that will allow a
human or machine to determine how well a particular specimen matches a
particular concept.

These are not in the current version of the RDF but their is a placeholder
for this kind of data.

These species concepts are not the only potential kind of concept, but they
are a data set that can be used to try out and see what works.

What I was hoping was that there would be some field in the DarwinCore that
would allow a user to map their specimen to the URI for a species concept.

These would not have to be only for these particular species concepts, but
something that worked in a similar way.

Here are some examples of these species concepts that are live on the Linked
Open Data Cloud.

The links on this page will take you to Sig.ma, a semantic web portal that
allows one to view what the Linked Open Data Cloud "knows" about these
species concepts.

http://www.taxonconcept.org/example-taxa/

Here are some example SPARQL queries that can be run live against the data
in the LOD cloud

http://www.taxonconcept.org/example-sparql-queries/

I have a small set of sample occurrence records in this data set that are
not currently in DarwinCore but I hope to modify in the near future.

This first blog entry provides a brief introduction to this particular
conceptualization.

http://www.taxonconcept.org/taxonconcept-blog/2010/6/9/introductory-blog-entry.html

<http://www.taxonconcept.org/taxonconcept-blog/2010/6/9/introductory-blog-entry.html>I
think that I should have probably stated my initial question a little
differently.

*Is there still a field that expect a URI and allows concepts like mine to
be linked to species occurrence records?*
*
*
*On first glance, it appeared as if this functionality had been removed.*

Respectfully,

- Pete

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Peter DeVries <pete.devries at gmail.com>wrote:

> I was looking through the latest DarwinCore and comments related to the
> TaxonConceptID.
>
> Since the name serves as both a unique identifier and a phylogenetic
> hypothesis, you are effectively saying that observations labeled
>
> *Aedes triseriatus*
>
> and
>
> *Ochlerotatus triseriatus*
>
> Are separate species concepts, and should therefore be treated as separate
> things.
>
> i.e. The name is the concept.
>
> Also since there are several name variants for each "species", how do you
> distinguish which of these nameID's are the same species and which are
> different?
>
> - Pete
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Pete DeVries
> Department of Entomology
> University of Wisconsin - Madison
> 445 Russell Laboratories
> 1630 Linden Drive
> Madison, WI 53706
> GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
> About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>



-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
------------------------------------------------------------
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