[Tdwg-tag] RDF resources

Roderic Page r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Thu Mar 23 23:33:44 CET 2006


There are various resources you might want to take a look at.

Perhaps a good place to start is "From XML to RDF: how semantic web  
technologies will change the design of 'omic' standards"  
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nbt1139), which presents reasons for moving  
from XML to RDF.

There are various introductions on the web, for example  
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/w-rdf/ (bit old now). Tim  
Bray's article (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html) may also  
be useful. PlanetRDF has lots of stuff (and I do mean lots)  
(http://planetrdf.com/guide/).

Because a lot is going on in the world of RDF, I've found reading blogs  
of some of the key players to be useful. Danny Ayers  
(http://dannyayers.com/) has some very useful stuff, probably more  
helpful for getting your head around the mindset. RDF is one of those  
things that you may need to have the "ahhh" moment when it suddenly  
clicks why it's potentially cool. I've found reading Danny's blog has  
been helpful in this respect.

I got into this area via LSIDs, which in one sense are distinct from  
RDF, but for me I "got" LSIDs once I saw what one could do with all the  
RDF they are associated with. I have a manuscript on LSIDs, RDF, and  
taxonomic names that might be of interest  
(http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/lsid/examples/lsid.pdf).

The other reason I got into this is via facetted browsing, which is an  
approach to browsing metadata-rich information using "facets". Again,  
this doesn't need RDF as such, but RDF and associated triplestores make  
this thing pretty straightforward to do. For a simple example see  
http://www.swed.org.uk/swed/index.html (which is driven by RDF).   
Silobreaker (http://www.silobreaker.com/corporate/) is this sort of  
approach on steroids.

Regards

Rod





On 23 Mar 2006, at 20:15, Javier de la Torre wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Now that so much is being discussed about RDF I was wondering if
> someone could point me to some good resources where I can learn more
> about it. I think there are several people right now trying to catch
> up with this technology so some help would be really appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Javier.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tdwg-tag mailing list
> Tdwg-tag at lists.tdwg.org
> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag_lists.tdwg.org
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----------------------------------------
Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

Phone:    +44 141 330 4778
Fax:      +44 141 330 2792
email:    r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
web:      http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html

Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic
Biologists Website:  http://systematicbiology.org
Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/
Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org
Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com






More information about the tdwg-tag mailing list