[tdwg-content] use cases and competency questions

joel sachs jsachs at csee.umbc.edu
Thu Jul 28 04:32:26 CEST 2011


Hey Hilmar,

I probably don't understand your objection. The data does matter, 
and I'm assuming that it will be in rough accordance with the 
ontology. The query referred to below was

select ?occurrence
where {
          ?occurrence rdf:type dwc:occurrence .
 	?occurrence dwc:ofIndividual [individual] .
}

for some specific value of [individual].

If I read your example correctly, there's an occurrence of an individual 
named "wolfpack". So if I'm querying for occurrences of "wolfpack", then 
your occurrence would be returned.

But maybe the point of your example isn't that the individual is named 
wolfpack, but that the individual *is* a wolfpack, and the rdf is bad. In 
this case, yes, problems will arise.

One question that your example raises (and is maybe related to what you 
have in mind?) is: Supposes we allow Individuals/BiologicalEntities to include 
wolf packs. How would we query for occurrences of wolf packs? One proposal 
on the table last Fall was to include some sort of scoping property for 
the Individual class, e.g. scope="individualOrganism", or 
scope="Population". We could also define individualOrganism and 
Population to be subClasses of biologicalEntity.

Please let me know if I've missed your point entirely.

Joel.



On Wed, 27 Jul 2011, Hilmar Lapp wrote:

>
> On Jul 27, 2011, at 10:25 AM, joel sachs wrote:
>
>> When answering this query, does it matter whether the scope of 
>> Individual/Biological Entity includes organelles or wolf packs? Does it 
>> matter if the Individual/BiologicalEntities are taxonomically homogeneous? 
>> To me, the clear answer to both questions is no.
>
>
> Isn't that pretending that the data against which you ask this query doesn't 
> matter? What if the data had a data <x> with <x> rdf:type dwc:occurrence>; 
> <x> dwc:ofIndividual "wolfpack"?
>
> 	-hilmar
> -- 
> ===========================================================
> : Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
> ===========================================================
>
>


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