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

[Paul Murray]

On 09/05/2011, at 1:08 PM, Bob Morris wrote:

> 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.

Well, the advantage is that applications that wish to integrate with such data need not make the declaration as part of the application. This particularly applies to things that don't understand taxonomy, things that browse the semantic web in general. It allows things like that to look at a whole world of URIs that identify tc taxa, a whole world of uris that identify DwC taxa, and go "hang on, these have something in common". 

Without these declarations, predicate names are little more than database column names in a data dump somewhere: you need a human to understand the equivalences, to supply the fact that the two taxon concepts are the same sorts of things.

As for data, we use the tc: vocabulary for a couple of million or so data records at biodiversity.org.au . 

	http://biodiversity.org.au/taxon/Fabaceae.rdf
	http://biodiversity.org.au/taxon/Fabaceae.html

I'm not really looking forward to recoding my data extraction so as to use the new DwC, when it's ready - although that will have to be done at some point.


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