[tdwg-content] Does a species entail a specific classification or does it have many classifications.

[Gregor Hagedorn]

> If this is so trivial then why does GBIF have one map for Felis concolor and
> one map for Puma concolor?
> also why does the Barcode of life not have all their Aedes triseriatus and
> Ochlerotatus triseriatus mapped to one id rather than one for each name and
> misspelling?

I think it shows that the real problem is not URLs versus strings, the
problem is the knowledge behind these strings.

>> se:Puma_concolor_sec._Smith
> How many lexical variants of the string above are there likely to be?

This is a misunderstanding, my example is a URI, with owl:sameAs etc. behind


> What you see as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassia_(legume) is
> actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassia_%28legume%29
> Things like & need to be replace with & Note that if you are not careful
> this can become &&&&& as it is re-encoded.

It certainly happens that bugs appear even after 20 years of using
URLs, but it is a class of highly generic bugs in any web-software. It
does not appear a good argument to me.

I am not aware that people have problems linking to Wikipedia or
DBpedia, which happens to use exactly these human-proofreadable URIs.

-------------

> Also aren't TDWG URI's supposed to be opaque?

Why do we use dwc:scientificName instead of
dwc:entity013030d4a93abdd6206234b683c51b31 ?

I am sure the semantic vocabulary management system for DarwinCore
would show the proper label for the opaque URI... :-)

Basically, programmers demand human readability for their own domain,
but deny it to the biodiversity domain itself...

I fully believe you and all who are doing it do it with careful
consideration of the needs as they see it. I just believe that those
taking these decisions have a specific perspective and use case
scenarios, that involves biologists only after the perfect software
user interface system is finished. I challenge the last assumption ...

Redesign tdwg vocabularies and Darwincore with opaque
dwc:concept013030d4a93abdd6206234b683c51b31 URIs instead of
dwc:commonName (where I really prefer the synonym vernacularName - or
is it the other way round?) and proof that it works well for
communication and discussion.

I believe Opaque IDs work OK if they can be systematically and
unambiguously assigned. Taxon names and concepts can not, they need to
be discussed and "debugged" probably over decades. Just like tdwg
vocabularies -- just 6 orders of magnitude greater scope.

Gregor