[tdwg-content] Comments on Cam's RDF practical details of recording a determination What is an Occurrence? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Thu Nov 4 05:40:56 CET 2010

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 1:15 AM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>wrote:

>  This is mostly over my head, but I do have a more general question along
> these lines:
>
> To what extent are we likely to be implementing substantive machine
> reasoning for Agents within the context of biodiversity informatics?  I can
> see some value in terms of de-duplication of literature citations, and maybe
> a few other things here and there such as copyright ownership.  But I take
> the absence of an Agent class within DwC as an indication that our community
> does not have as much a need for semantic reasoning for Agents (compared to,
> say, taxa and localities, among others).
>
> If I'm missing something here, I'd very much like to be informed.
>
> Aloha,
> Rich
>
>
My words "be wary of" were chosen intentionally. I do not mean "do not use
in any circumstances".  The following are roughly true:

 It's not that hard to come up with an arguably important use cases for
reasoning on agents.  For example, deciding whether two observation or
specimen data records represent distinct or the same Occurrence can
hinge---with enough agreement on other values---on deciding whether the
observers are the same or different people.  Herbarium duplicate  sheets
often  suffer inconsistent misspellings of collector names due to data entry
errors.

Including an intractable ontology in an otherwise tractable one can poison
the latter.

[1] - [3] show that there are plenty of ways out of the  current, not very
deep, reasoning weaknesses that FOAF shares with many "OWL Full"
ontologies.  The risk is mainly in getting on board the wrong train of the
many. For example, one way favors huge data but requires small class
hierarchies, and another the reverse. It's not hard to imagine biodiversity
data models that demand both large class hierarchies and large data.
Homegrown hybrids might be possible, but then might require homegrown tools,
etc. etc.

[3] is particularly interesting and probably readable with just a little
exposure to formal ontologies, especially if you pretend that the acronyms
and other stuff you don't understand don't matter very much to getting the
big picture.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-owl2-profiles-20081202/#Introduction
[2] http://www.semanticoverflow.com/questions/1210/owl-full-and-reasoning
[3] Edward Thomas et al.  Lightweight Reasoning and the Web of Data for Web
Science, Web Science Conf. 2010, April 26-27, 2010, Raleigh, NC, USA
http://journal.webscience.org/319/

Bob Morris

Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: morris.bob at gmail.com
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram <http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram>
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)

>  ------------------------------
> *From:* Bob Morris [mailto:morris.bob at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Tuesday, November 02, 2010 6:56 PM
> *To:* Richard Pyle
> *Cc:* Paul Murray; Steve Baskauf; tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
>
> *Subject:* Re: [tdwg-content] Comments on Cam's RDF practical details of
> recording a determination What is an Occurrence? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]
>
> If machine reasoning is a goal, I would be wary of FOAF.  An OWL2-DL, or
> other OWL2 tractable reasoning profile, version remains a moving target, to
> the best of my knowledge.  The reasons that http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ is
> not subject to tractable reasoning are relatively manageable, but I can no
> longer find the Zimmerman proposal for a FOAF DL version referenced in the
> thread ending at
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Jul/0378.html
>
> Can someone point me at a DL version of FOAF and indication that it is
> actively under discussion somewhere?
>
> Thanks
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>wrote:
>
>>
>> I was thoroughly delighted to learn recently that FOAF uses terms in
>> almost
>> exactly the same way that I had structured my "Agents" data (right down to
>> the same exat terms, in most cases).  I plan to move forward with the FOAF
>> terms that are relevant (thanks to John W. for pointing this out to me at
>> TDWG).
>>
>> Rich
>>
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org
>> > [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Paul Murray
>> > Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2010 4:18 PM
>> > To: Steve Baskauf
>> > Cc: tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
>> > Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Comments on Cam's RDF practical
>> > details of recording a determination What is an Occurrence?
>> > [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]
>> >
>> >
>> > On 29/10/2010, at 12:41 AM, Steve Baskauf wrote:
>> >
>> > > I think both dwc:recordedBy for the Occurrence and
>> > dcterms:created for some tokens should be provided.
>> > Depending on the situation, they might be different entities
>> > (I think John Wieczorek pointed this out in an earlier
>> > thread).  dwc:recordedBy is specifically supposed to be a
>> > person whereas I think dcterms:creator could be a person or
>> > an institution.
>> >
>> > Perhaps it might be worthwhile leveraging the FOAF vocabulary
>> > (Friend of a Friend). It's mainly meant for social
>> > networking, but nevertheless it does contain terms such as
>> > Person, Organisation, Group and Project. (Project is
>> > interesting - collection activities perhaps are FOAF Projects).
>> >
>> > The spec is here: http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
>> >
>> > We can envisage the day where, by following links on
>> > taxonomic web pages, you could eventually find an Author's
>> > current twitter address, or ask the semantic web "find me all
>> > specimens of genus Tandanus collected by teams affiliated
>> > with the university of NSW between 2005 and 2007".
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > ------
>> > If you have received this transmission in error please notify
>> > us immediately by return e-mail and delete all copies. If
>> > this e-mail or any attachments have been sent to you in
>> > error, that error does not constitute waiver of any
>> > confidentiality, privilege or copyright in respect of
>> > information in the e-mail or attachments.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Please consider the environment before printing this email.
>> >
>> > ------
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > tdwg-content mailing list
>> > tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
>> > http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
>> >
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> tdwg-content mailing list
>> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Robert A. Morris
> Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
> UMASS-Boston
> 100 Morrissey Blvd
> Boston, MA 02125-3390
> Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
> email: morris.bob at gmail.com
> web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
> web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
> http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram <http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram>
> phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
>
>

-
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/attachments/20101104/504ff349/attachment.html 