[tdwg-tag] dwcterms (was: Embedding specimen (and other) annotations in NeXML)

[Hilmar Lapp]

On Feb 23, 2009, at 5:55 PM, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:

>
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 8:29 AM, Hilmar Lapp <hlapp at duke.edu> wrote:
>> Thanks John - this now works and loads into Protege. Great!
>>
>> A couple of random comments from a first inspection:
>>
>> - There are lots of individuals that seem to correspond to classes  
>> and
>> object properties (and seem to be replaced by them, which sounds  
>> odd). Is
>> this by intention?
>
> I don't know what you mean by this. Can you give me an example?

As far as I can see the replaces relationships to classes have gone  
away. For object properties, an example is AcceptedTaxon:

<rdf:Description rdf:ID="AcceptedTaxon">
   <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#Property 
"/>
   <rdfs:domain rdf:resource="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Taxon"/>
   <rdfs:replaces rdf:resource="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/AcceptedTaxon-2008-11-19 
"/>
</rdf:Description>

This seems fine.

BTW note that unless I'm missing something the base URLs http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/ 
  and http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf result in different URIs  
for concepts (hence making them effectively different) for what you  
may want to be the same (the URLs seem to be used interchangeably -  
but maybe the idea behind this is different?).

> [...]
>> - seeAlso often has the value 'not in ABCD', which is probably the  
>> wrong
>> kind of value for this annotation.
>
> None of those values is technically very useful, as they are
> references to xpaths in a schema. As such, "not in ABCD" is no
> different functionally speaking from any of the other values. If
> seeAlso is not appropriate for this type of content (where is the
> reasoning for that?)

According to the RDF Schema spec, rdfs:seeAlso is "[...] used to  
indicate a resource that might provide additional information about  
the subject resource." The value of the property is supposed to be a  
rdfs:Resource (i.e., a URI to/for a resource).

See http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_seealso

> [...]
>> - There are two classes with label 'Taxon' (but different URIs).
>> Intentional?
>
> I see only one. What are the URIs?

Now there are actually three:

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf#Taxon
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf#Taxon-2008-11-19
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Taxon

All three have label "Taxon", and are classes, and there is no  
asserted relationship between them.

>> - Same properties and some classes have the date suffix in their  
>> label.
>> Intentional?
>
> Every one of them has a date suffix in its label as far as I can see.
> What are the exceptions?

There are no classes anymore now with a suffix in the label, but many  
of the properties have it. For example:

SamplingEvent-2008-11-19
LivingSpecimen-2008-11-19
PreservedSpecimen-2008-11-19

For those there seems to be another term without the suffix.

> [...]
> Again, all of them have the date suffix as far I I can see. Yes, term
> versioning is the motivation. They are all in the one document so that
> the entirety of the documentation, including history, can be produced
> from it. It isn't so much that there are a lot of updates expected as
> that there is a lot of historical nonsense to resolve unequivocally.
> Here it is all in one place.

Maybe it would be worth producing two versions - one with the history  
that allows the maintainers to resolve issues, and one for public  
consumption that has the cruft removed?

> [...] The solution, I think, is to add each base term without  
> version information and give these terms rdfs:replaces with the  
> value of the term with the version number. This would give a  
> complete progression for any term up to the one currently
> in use. I have done that in a copy of the file just committed. Does
> that solve the problem adequately? Does it create any new ones?


Looks a lot better now - thanks!

BTW note that the server returns the ontology with mime-type text/html  
rather than application/rdf+xml. Not a big deal, just the browser will  
try to display it rather than downloading.

	-hilmar
-- 
===========================================================
: Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
===========================================================