[tdwg-content] Heretics and illuminati, oh my! [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Bob Morris]

I'm generally sympathetic to this approach except for c) and not only
because of my familiar whine that mindlessly putting domains on
predicates constrains extensibility to no salutary effect other than
to constrain extensibility. That being a stated goal of Steve and Cam,
a more important issue might be that the tdwg ontologies in their
present form have an ambiguous future. To my knowledge, the TDWG
adoption process has never even been begun for them, and indeed
http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-ontology/ seems to have been dormant
since December 2009, and the earlier (2007!)
http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonConcept seems to carry a warning
that the google site is more authoritative. IMO, one may consider the
vocabulary at least socially, if not actually deprecated.  Steve
raised this issue in the earlier post in this subject.

So the question remains: what advantage of subclassing tc:TaxonConcept
accrues to users of the specification?  If there is actually data
coded to tc:TaxonConcept, then applications that wish to integrate
with such data, e.g. LOD apps, can make the subclass declaration as
part of the application, and integration with what, if anything,
replaces tc:TaxonConcept will not be impeded.

Bob Morris

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 9:34 PM, Paul Murray <pmurray at anbg.gov.au> wrote:
>
>[snip]

> So, I'd suggest the safe way to go would be
>
> a) yes, import the tdwg classes by all means
> b) declare your classes to be subclasses of the tdwg ones
> c) declare that your predicates have a domain/range of the TDWG classes
>
>
> (An *even safer* way to go is to create a completely generic "TaxonThingy" superclass and to declare (in your vocabulary) that tdwg_Taxon is a subclass of that ... but this is so safe that it doesn't accomplish anything useful. You may as well not have range and domain declarations at all.)
>
>
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>



-- 
Robert A. Morris

Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
IT Staff
Filtered Push Project
Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University


email: morris.bob at gmail.com
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