[tdwg-content] Idea for Discussion, Differentiating between "type's" of identifiers

[Cam Webb]

Dear Steve, Pete, Stan, and others,

I've just joined this list and have been trying to digest the key points 
of the many posts of the last few weeks.  The posts touching on 
serializing data about individual organisms in the field as RDF and 
best-practice application of DwC terms have resonated with me.  I am 
looking for recommendations for modeling individual-level data (with 
photos, DNA records, identifications, morphology observations, etc), for 
thousands of new plant observations in Indonesia over the next 3 years, as 
Linked Data, and would like to have to invent as few new terms as 
possible.  Pete's Geospecies example and Steve's RDF Appendix in his 
recent Biodiv. Info. paper (7:17-44) have been very helpful.

> I "volunteered" a couple weeks ago to have a go at writing an RDF guide 
> for Darwin Core.... As a part of this process, I think it would be good 
> to create one or more "boilerplate" RDF files for the various kinds of 
> resources that are likely to be identified with GUIDs (e.g. Occurrences, 
> Taxa, etc.).

Please sign me up to help!  Such a guide is badly needed, for users. 
Perhaps we could start a page (or set of pages) on the TDWG wiki with the 
various choices of term for modeling each `hasA...' relationship, with a 
short outline of the pros and cons.  I've been looking for such 
collection but haven't found one (other than the DwC ontology at 
http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/).

I think the focus on the `Individual as a base Thing' that has been 
discussed this month is really important for potentially bridging to the 
work done by the ecological informatics community (e.g., modeling 1,000's 
of trees in sample plots as LOD) and the phenotype observation community 
(i.e., Quality-Entity relations as RDF).  Determining the vocabulary that 
best extends DwC to these other domains will be very helpful.

Best,

Cam


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  |  CAMPBELL O. WEBB                               |
  |  Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University         |
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