[tdwg-guid] BioGUID
Roderic Page
r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tue Mar 20 15:14:43 CET 2007
Dear All,
I've put together a web site called http://bioguid.info which, rather
grandly, is an attempt to bootstrap the biodiversity Semantic Web by
providing resolvable URIs for biological objects, such as publications,
taxonomic names, nucleotide sequences, and specimens.
These URIs (or "GUIDs") can be resolved by a web browser to display
HTML, but under the hood are resolved to RDF (which you can see by
viewing the source of the web page you get for a URI).
The web interface is really window dressing, I just wanted a way to
display RDF that wouldn't frighten people (me included). For some URIs
all I do is grab XML and reformat it (e.g., DOIs). For GenBank records,
all manner of agony is involved in trying to extract specimen and
publication links.
A good place to get a sense of what bioguid.info is about is to start
with this Pubmed record: http://bioguid.info/pmid:17079492
From this, you can get a list of sequences. If you click on one of
those, you'll see a link to a specimen, which you can then look at
(you'll need Firefox 1.5, Camino, Webkkit, or a browser with a SVG
plugin for the full effect).
What I'm hoping to do is start doing things like taking a TreeBASE
record, getting the linked sequences, running these through
bioguid.info to extract georeferenced specimen links, so with minimal
effort we get a map (and eventually a Google Earth tree a la Bill
Piel).
The glue to make this happen comprises HTTP URIs that are
dereferenceable to RDF. This is my mantra for the day.
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
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