[Tdwg-guid] (Fwd) Fwd: [TDWG] Announce: Proposal for "microformat" for mar

[Roderic Page]

>  People can use OWL or GML or TAPIR or ... but which do the clients  
> actually want to use? It would be a lot easier if we only used one. A  
> few client applications would certainly clarify things.

I know this won't surprise regular readers, but if any client is  
thinking of using more than one data source, is there anything as  
simple and as general as RDF? I spend most of my time mangling all  
sorts of weird stuff (Darwin Core in all its variants, Google Earth  
KML, CrossRef XML, PubMed XML, Genbank XML, HTML, Yahoo Images XML,  
etc., much of it all nicely defined with - gack - XML schemas, that of  
course I don't actually read) into RDF so I can actually do something.

Within a single domain people can pretty much do what they like (and  
have done so), but once we start sharing and aggregating (e.g.,  
specimens, images, sequences, publications, observations, people) then  
why not aim for one data format and a few simple, shared vocabularies.

I'm sure this is naive, but it seems that we persist in making things  
just about as difficult as we possibly can.

Rod

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Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

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