[tdwg-content] Proposed new Darwin Core environmental terms from ENVO

[Steve Baskauf]

In Audubon Core [1], there are sometimes other terms that are associated 
with a string term whose purpose is to indicate the controlled 
vocabulary being used in the other term (e.g. Iptc4xmpExt:CVterm for a 
controlled value term and ac:subjectCategoryVocabulary to indicate the 
vocabulary from which the controlled value term comes).  I reviewed the 
DwC terms and I guess there is no precedent for that kind of thing in 
DwC.  I suppose if people want to be unambiguous, they should just use 
URIs.  Unfortunately, I'm not aware of URIs for the terms from various 
systems of describing biomes.  I suppose someone could mint terms if 
they cared about this.  Or use ENVO uris.

Steve

[1] http://terms.gbif.org/wiki/Audubon_Core_Term_List_%281.0_normative%29

John Wieczorek wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Steve Baskauf
> <steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
>   
>> The other thing I'm wondering about the values of dwc:biome would be how a
>> user would indicate the controlled vocabulary one is using.  The ENVO
>> ontology is mentioned.  Under the scenario of the draft RDF guide, the term
>> dwcuri:biome would have a URI value of
>> <http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ENVO_01000195>.  That would be unambiguous.
>> However, if dwc:biome is reserved for literal values (as the RDF guide
>> suggests it should be) then how does a machine know that "flooded grassland
>> biome" is a label from ENVO and not a literal description of a biome from
>> the Whittaker, Walter, Bailey, etc. systems which are probably currently in
>> much wider use than ENVO and therefore likely controlled vocabularies of
>> choice for many users?
>>     
>
> A machine will have no way to know from which vocabulary a value for a
> property comes unless the value says so. That is common to all terms
> that recommend a controlled vocabulary, but do not enforce it. It
> would be no different for dwc:biome. The only way to be unambiguous is
> to provide an unambiguous value, which, as you noted,
> http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ENVO_01000195 is.
>
> .
>
>   

-- 
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

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