[Tdwg-guid] [tdwg-tag] Another reason why RDF is cool

[Roger Hyam]

Nice demo Rod!

Makes me wonder how I can get a script to generate a spreadsheet to fill 
in based on an RDFS vocabulary. Basically would be sheet for each class, 
row for each instance, column for each property.....hmmm - maybe later.

Roger


Roderic Page wrote:
> I know that there is some scepticism about RDF, so I thought I'd 
> relate an experience I had yesterday at The Natural History Museum in 
> London. A colleague of mine has often complained about how hard it is 
> to get his data (and data others have) into a useful form for the web, 
> and that efforts such as the Semantic Web only seem to make this harder.
>
> So, as an experiment, I attempted to get some information about an ant 
> image into a local triple store. This involved putting some triples in 
> a table using EditGrid (an online spreadsheet), grabbing the XML, 
> converting it to RDF, and importing that into the triple store. See 
> here for details: 
> http://semant.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-triples-using-editgrid.html.
>
> The bottom line is that it was trivially easy to go from a spreadsheet 
> to a triple store, and hence add new information about this ant. 
> Writing it up in the blog took as long as the actual work.
>
> This particular example concerns one image harvested from the web. 
> Things like adding distribution records in bulk would be even easier.
>
> So, my question is this: is there anything other than RDF that can 
> make this as straightforward as it is? If so, I'd love to hear it...
>
> Regards
>
> Rod
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>
> 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
> iChat:    aim://rodpage1962
> 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
> Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> tdwg-tag mailing list
> tdwg-tag at lists.tdwg.org
> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
>


-- 

-------------------------------------
 Roger Hyam
 Technical Architect
 Taxonomic Databases Working Group
-------------------------------------
 http://www.tdwg.org
 roger at tdwg.org
 +44 1578 722782
-------------------------------------