[tdwg-content] opposing anything that comes from outside a small click was Re: If you need something for referring to a population, then it is probably best to do it as a related class
Steve Baskauf
steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu
Sat Apr 30 04:46:33 CEST 2011
Hi Pete,
I want to respond to your message in two parts. It may take me some
time to write a response to the second part (i.e. questions about your
suggestion) so it may not come right away. But I also wanted to comment
about the first part, that is:
Peter DeVries wrote:
> I am still somewhat puzzled why TDWG seems so opposed to adopting
> anything that comes from outside a small click?
>
I'm not exactly sure if this is directed at Cam and me (in the context
of darwin-sw), or to others. If it is directed at me, then you can read
my response. If not, then you can ignore it.
First of all, I'd like to say that I greatly respect the work that
you've done on trying to promote the use of LOD in the TDWG community.
I have read every one of your posts and have tried to understand all of
them to the extent that I'm able. I think we referenced your posts over
20 times at
http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/TdwgContentEmailSummary, cited
your taxon concept examples at
http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/ClassTaxon and included your
model in the analysis of previous models at
http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/RelationshipToExistingModels.
Your suggestion of using the geo: scheme was included in the discussion
of the Location class at
http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/ClassLocation . I would say
that at least half of what I know about RDF comes from looking at your
examples and trying to understand what you have done. I am therefore
very grateful for the work that you have done and your enthusiasm for
bringing creative ideas into the community.
So why did Cam and I create Darwin-SW instead of just using your
ontologies at taxonconcept.org ? There are several reasons, some of
which are alluded to at
http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/RelationshipToExistingModels .
But to be succinct (OK, maybe not that succinct), I'll state them here:
1. Darwin Core is a ratified TDWG standard. It therefore qualifies as a
"well-known" vocabulary. If I refer to dwc:recordedBy as a property,
people in the biodiversity informatics community will know what it
means. If I refer to dwc:Identification, it will also be known in our
community. For this reason, Cam and I wanted as much as possible to
build Darwin-SW on Darwin Core rather than using terms that we or any
other individual minted.
2. Cam and I wanted the Darwin-SW ontology to (as much as possible)
reflect the community consensus on what classes meant and and how they
were related to each other. Of course, the problem is knowing what that
consensus was. After the hundreds of emails that were posted on the
tdwg-content list from September 2010 to the present, I feel like I have
a much better understanding of what the consensus is than I did before
(where there IS a consensus, of course). I have spent more hours than I
care to remember trying to read, re-read, and understand the various
emails that were sent and then asking annoying questions until somebody
was patient enough to explain things to me. Most of those explanations
are referenced on the class wiki pages. So I don't consider the ideas
embodied in Darwin-SW to be "our" ideas - they are the ideas we absorbed
from the community, including you. (If you want to see "my" actual
ideas, look at the examples in my Biodiversity Informatics article. I
don't really think that they are really that good any more.) The
outlook of DSW also recognizes historical precedents such as the ACS
model. As cool and clever as taxonconcept.org is, it fundamentally
represents Pete DeVries' ideas. That means that it will readily be
accepted by you, but the community may be less apt to buy into it if it
doesn't embody community concepts. It may turn out that Darwin-SW does
NOT actually represent the community consensus (as we hope it does), or
is stupid, or doesn't work. In those cases, it will get shot down and
somebody else will pick up the task of trying to figure out what the
community consensus is about how things should be represented in RDF. I
should note that I don't think the discussion last Oct/Nov was limited
to a clique of TDWG architects. I was an active participant and I
certainly don't qualify as a TDWG insider, having only been to one TDWG
meeting for less than 24 hours and knowing almost no other TDWG
contributors personally.
3. There are a couple of structural things about taxonconcept.org terms
and classes that I have questions about and I'll raise them in my second
email to come after this one. But I think that one of the most
problematic things about taxonconcept.org for me is the way that you
describe taxon concepts. I hate to even bring up the subject because
it's taken me months just to try to understand what people mean when
they are talking about a taxon concept and I don't want to unleash
another hundred emails about the minutae of taxon concepts, which people
on this list love to talk about. So suffice it to say that the sense
that I've gotten from the many posts on the subject is that most people
see a Taxon Concept (= = Taxon and similar to a "taxon name use") as the
combination of a taxon name and a "sensu" or "secundum" (accordingTo)
reference. That's how it is modeled in the TCS model, which is another
ratified TDWG standard. That's also how it's modeled in the unfinished
TDWG ontology, which despite its unfinished state is nonetheless is
actually being used by some people to describe taxon concepts (see
http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/ClassTaxon for links to some
examples). When I look at how you model taxon concepts such as in
http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p.rdf which describes the species
concept http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p#Species , there are a lot
of metadata about the scientific name, related name strings, URIs that
represent similar resources, connections to the original description,
etc. But I don't see any sensu/secundum reference or a property that
links to one. So although http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p#Species
is a cool thing that links to a lot of useful information about Puma
concolor, it doesn't seem to be the same thing as what everybody else is
calling a taxon concept. If I were to link to your "species concepts",
you and I might know what that meant, but nobody else would. That is in
contrast to a tc:Taxon (= = tc:TaxonConcept) instance which is defined
by reference to the TCS model and I would therefore consider "well
known" (and is what we DO reference in DSW).
So I think that in some sense, my reluctance to adopt individually
"minted" classes and properties comes from the reason why I'm interested
in RDF in the first place. I'm actually NOT very interested in using
RDF to do reasoning in the "Semantic Web" sense - I guess I'm still a
bit of a skeptic about how likely it is that anybody will be able to
find out anything useful by doing reasoning on RDF that they suck in
from the cloud, particularly if lots of people are using their own
minted properties and if different people intend for the classes they
use to rdf:type things to mean different things and have different
properties. What I AM interested in is figuring out a way to make it
possible for people to have a consistent understanding of the meaning of
metadata that they discover when they resolve GUIDs. I think that will
be increasingly important when projects like BiSciCol get rolling. The
only way that I see this as possible is to base properties primarily on
vocabularies that a lot of institutions already "understand" and are
using, like Darwin Core.
That doesn't mean that people will ONLY use Darwin Core. I have already
heard plenty of talk on this list about using other vocabularies such as
geo:, skos:, and foaf: (with some cautions from Bob). John Wieczorek,
the architect of the Darwin Core standard, proposed adding geo: terms to
DwC (see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/issues/detail?id=82).
There are also at least four people on this list that I know are
interested in trying to make sure that DwC can interface with the OBOE
ontology. So I don't think it is fair to say that "TDWG" is opposed to
adopting things outside its clique. I just think that people are
cautious about supporting things that they are not familiar with (or
perhaps don't understand) and in a lot of cases just don't have the time
(or aren't willing to take the time) to figure out something new.
So I hope that you aren't discouraged that people are slow to jump on
the LOD bandwagon. I think that more people will be interested in
supporting it when they start seeing tangible applications within our
community and that's already starting to happen. Unfortunately, since
you are so far ahead of the rest of us in your understanding of how the
LOD world works, I think that you are probably doomed to be one of the
ones pulling the wagon! :-) I look forward (as I have in the past) to
hearing more of your innovative ideas.
Steve
--
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
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