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

[Steve Baskauf]

Hilmar Lapp wrote:
>
>
>>   I suppose someone could mint terms if they cared about this. 
>
> Certainly not - minting random terms whose semantic content consists 
> solely of a non-resolving URI string or a string in whatever natural 
> language is barely better than providing no value at all. 
>
Well, I wasn't thinking of just any "somebody" creating random terms 
with non-dereferencing URIs.  I was thinking about using the new GBIF 
terms management capabilities which I think is probably intended to 
(among other things) host controlled vocabularies.  Also, I was assuming 
SKOS or some other well-known mechanism for expressing relationships 
would be used to describe the controlled-value-URI-identified resources.
>> Or use ENVO uris.
>
> Yes, indeed. If they don't exist yet, ask that they do. That's the way 
> to build community ontologies - by a community actively working to 
> make the ontology what it needs it to be.
Well, the problem here is that there is only one ENVO ontology.   There 
are many systems for defining what a biome is (see wikipedia for 
examples).  Data producers will use the biome system they believe in and 
are already using, and that won't necessarily be the one system that 
ENVO comes up with.  We can't legislate that everyone use ENVO.  So 
create controlled vocabularies for the various extant systems and use 
SKOS or something like that to describe how they are related so that a 
machine can understand the relationships. 

Steve


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

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