[tdwg-content] More Strange Monkey Business-like things in GBIF KOS Document

[Peter DeVries]

Sure, I will need to be brief.

1) The KOS document is still largely dismissive of Linked Open Data

2) If you look at the current Darwin Core as represented by the TDWG
BioBlitz Occurrence Data Set.
    http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~jsachs/occurrences/TechnoBioblitzOccurrences.rdf
.

a) uses it's own date vocab rather and formatting rather than dc:date
b) don't think the current version of the vocab resolves correctly following
LOD standards
c) other than the *geo* which TDWG does not seem to agree with how much of
this is using any other commonly used LOD vocabulary

How well does this data set work to query for occurrences of a given
species?

Or identifications or observations by a particular person?

Was there any thought to identifying which of the various identifications is
the preferred one for mapping etc?

These are all issues that become apparent when you start marking up records
and attempting queries.

I modified this somewhat so that at least some of the occurrences are tied
not to only a particular non-normalized name but to a species concept.

I also started to normalize the various text strings for people to a
standard URI. The data itself has the same person identified with several
name variations.

It is here:
http://lod.taxonconcept.org/tdwg2010bioblitz/TechnoBioblitzOccurrences_dates.rdf

As I showed earlier this version has the same person linked via the same
identifier and allows browsing a queries base on semantically informative
identifiers.

To query the original data for occurrences of a given species you would need
to know all the various names that people entered for that taxon.


        Here is an example of a improved record  http://bit.ly/hy4HFi (People
and species concept unambiguously defined with URI's and linked to related
records)


        Here is a poorly linked record http://bit.ly/fSReZS (The same people
and the same species labeled with a number of different string combinations
etc. )

         Not clear who recorded what things, what other things the recorded,
or what things are the same species and what things are different species.


In summary, to get these to work in a way that others expect I had to make
them more like the TaxonConcept.org records.

I have been advocating for some of differences like a URI for a species
concept, and adopting well understood external vocabularies this and other
lists since 2006.

Considering how many examples etc. and discussions I have been involved in
it seems a bit strange that the authors of the KOS paper characterize my
efforts as

"in the GeoSpecies project104 based on a small purpose-built ontology105 of
mosquito-borne human pathogens."

 Respectfully,

- Pete


On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Hilmar Lapp <hlapp at nescent.org> wrote:

> Pete:
>
> On Feb 11, 2011, at 5:24 PM, Peter DeVries wrote:
>
> Is there some reason why there is so much "push" towards specialized near
> proprietary solutions like LSID's and LOD unfriendly vocabularies?
>
>
> Would you mind to elaborate what you mean by this?
>
> -hilmar
>
>  --
> ===========================================================
> : Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
> ===========================================================
>
>
>
>


-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
TaxonConcept Knowledge Base <http://www.taxonconcept.org/> / GeoSpecies
Knowledge Base <http://lod.geospecies.org/>
About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <http://about.geospecies.org/>
------------------------------------------------------------
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