[tdwg-tapir] Darwin & RDF
Renato De Giovanni
renato at cria.org.br
Wed Apr 18 22:30:18 CEST 2007
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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