[tdwg-tapir] Darwin & RDF

[Dave Vieglais]

Hi Renato,
I would favor the use of fragment identifiers for the predicates as  
it is consistent with their intended use.  I expect the difficulty  
associated with reconfiguration now will be much less than the  
problems encountered later if this change is not made.

Dave V.

On Apr 19, 2007, at 08:32, Renato De Giovanni wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> This is clearly a crosscutting issue and I thought about using the
> TAPIR mailing list for the following reasons:
>
> 1) The main people involved with DarwinCore are subscribed here;
> 2) This issue raised from a TAPIR use case;
> 3) It can affect all existing TAPIR/DarwinCore providers, as well as
> all output models based on DarwinCore.
>
> As you know, there was a recent release of TapirLink which includes
> an LSID authority that serves an RDF representation of DarwinCore by
> default.
>
> Everything seems to be working fine, but when I parse the resulting
> RDF in the W3C validator, I see that the predicates are being
> displayed as:
>
> http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwcoreGenus
>
> While in the semantic world the "expected" representation would be
> something like:
>
> http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwcore#Genus
>
> Apparently it seems just a cosmetic thing, but after some quick
> research this "unexpected representation" can cause problems
> depending on usage and tools: for instance, if it's necessary to
> perform RDF/XML round-tripping, then semantic web tools may not work
> if there's no clear separation between the namespace URI and local
> names, which is normally done by using the fragment identifier.
>
> If you're interested, you can find a similar discussion here:
> http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg16476.html
>
> Which has this interesting follow-up:
> http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg16480.html
>
> Since the new DarwinCore version and its extensions are not yet a
> TDWG standard and may even be subject to other changes, I'm proposing
> to add the fragment identifier to all Darwin namespaces. Better to do
> this as soon as possible if we're going to need this in the future.
>
> Please let me know if you have any comments, ideas or concerns...
>
> It may be the case that this change will affect other things (like
> the new GBIF REST service) although probably not as much as
> TAPIR/DarwinCore providers which will need to re-map their databases.
>
> Best Regards,
> --
> Renato
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