[Tdwg-guid] ontology &TCS RDF

[Kennedy, Jessie]

Hi Folks

For info, as Steve mentioned we (Rob, Robert and me)have been working on
a draft ontology for TDWG that the subgroups were involved in and which
was reported briefly at the last GUID meeting. The agreement was to
present the results of this at TDWG after we did some testing in a mini
project over the summer to see how usable it was.

We're still finishing off the documentation and no doubt there will be
things to discuss and changes to be made to the ontology but if you
really want to look at the ontology (in OWL) we used in the project you
can see it at http://tdwg.napier.ac.uk/ontology/ 
We had UML diagrams of the design - which I need to check to make sure
they are in agreement with the OWL, but you can look at the UML diagrams
on http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/TDWGOntology unfortunately
these don't go down to the level of detail being discussed and it is our
domain ontology that really lets you represent for example an actual
name.
We'll make the some sample RDF available in due course with the
software.

See you all at TDWG - hopefully with everything documented by then ;-)

Jessie



> -----Original Message-----
> From: tdwg-guid-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:tdwg-guid-
> bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Perry
> Sent: 26 September 2006 15:16
> To: S.Hinchcliffe at kew.org
> Cc: tdwg-guid at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Jena examples?
> 
> Hi Sally,
> 
> No problem.  The task was to create a prototype LSID resolver, not to
> solve all the KR issues surrounding taxon concepts.  However, I do
think
> it's time we start talking about these issues.  I worry that the
> prototype resolvers we set up will become de facto reference
> implementations, that other people will start to construct services
> modeled on the prototypes without us ever having gone back to talk
about
> what worked and what didn't.
> 
> I know there are several versions of TCS-in-RDF floating around.  I
> think Roger's is an RDFS document.  Rob Gales created an OWL-DL
version
> for the GBIF demonstration project that Jessie and he worked on this
> summer.  Early this year I created a partial implementation in
OWL-Lite
> (that I've since discarded).  While each one is "TCS", they're all
> substantially different in the way they represent TCS classes and
> properties, in part because the different representation languages
> (RDFS, OWL-Lite, OWL-DL) have different language features and
expressive
> powers.
> 
> It would be nice if we could devise one standard RDF implementation of
> TCS.  I don't care which one we use, but I would like to narrow the
> field to one so we can get the details sorted out.  I'm talking about
> details like resolvable namespaces, typed versus non-typed literals,
the
> use of anonymous resources, and serialization issues like the
> references-to-resources problem that cropped up in the IPNI example
> Peter Hollas is working from.  These details are quite important
because
> certain decisions taken here can effect the larger network of linked
> data providers.
> 
> Take the anonymous resources issues:  If you look at the example Peter
> cites, the typifiedBy property refers to an anonymous
NomenclaturalType
> that has a dc:title.  Within a single data provider, this is no big
deal
> because many different data objects can refer to this
> NomenclaturalType.  However the use of anonymous resources can cause
big
> problems when you try to harvest and index the data from multiple
> providers.  It also causes problems for the caching use case.
> 
> It would be nice to discuss some of these things, perhaps within TAG.
> 
> -Steve
> 
> 
> Sally Hinchcliffe wrote:
> > Hi Steve /all
> >
> > We took that syntax straight from Roger's RDF/TCS examples. I think
> > Roger was going to do more work on tidying up those sorts of loose
> > ends. I have to admit that my knowledge of RDF and particularly RDFS
> > is pretty superficial
> >
> > We can switch to either the shorter format or the safer fully
> > qualified URI - what do people think would be better?
> >
> > Sally
> >
> >
> >
> >> By the way, the IPNI example you cite has an error:
> >>
> >> <tn:nomenclaturalCode rdf:resource="&tn;#botanical" />
> >>
> >> Many RDF/XML parsers will see &tn; as an entity which cannot be
> >> resolved.  Since I don't have a copy of the ontology (and
> >> http://tdwg.org/2006/03/12/TaxonNames does not resolve), I can only
> take
> >> a guess that it should look something like:
> >>
> >> <tn:nomenclaturalCode rdf:resource="tn:botanical" />
> >>
> >> However, using XML namespace prefixes in resource references inside
> >> RDF/XML documents tends to cause problems because not all RDF/XML
> >> parsers are smart enough to dereference the namespace prefix and
build
> a
> >> fully-qualified resource URI.  A safer form of the above would be
the
> >> fully qualified resource URI which looks like:
> >>
> >> <tn:nomenclaturalCode
> rdf:resource="http://tdwg.org/2006/03/12/TaxonNames/botanical" />
> >>
> >>
> >> -Steve
> >>
> >>
> > *** Sally Hinchcliffe
> > *** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
> > *** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708
> > *** S.Hinchcliffe at rbgkew.org.uk
> >
> >
> 
> 
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