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

[Roger Hyam]

Thanks for this Jonathan,

I'd not read the OBO Foundry paper before. I think it would certainly  
be useful to think in terms of TDWG products being in a form that we  
could take to the foundry or followed foundry principles.

I would stress again though that we need to think in small chunks i.e.  
not in terms of one ontology for biodiversity informatics.

Roger

On 23 Feb 2009, at 22:27, Jonathan Rees wrote:

> As far as I'm aware the group with the greatest experience in ontology
> building - admittedly a young field - is OBO Foundry. The organizers
> have thought hard about good practice and community process and have
> practical experience with what does and doesn't work. The group says
> they're about biomedical ontologies, but there's nothing about their
> practices that wouldn't work in taxonomy-related domains.
>
> http://www.obofoundry.org/about.shtml
> http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/n11/full/nbt1346.html
>
> They are concerned with taxonomy, of course, but mostly as it relates
> to model organisms. Discussions about how to treat taxa have come up
> recently and I have told them they should look to the community that
> has fought these wars already...
>
> Personally I'd like to see a lot more cross-fertilization between
> taxonomy (biodiversity, collections, ...) and biomedical domains. For
> example, collections issues come up in contexts such as pathology and
> biological materials (plasmids etc.). Anatomy is probably another
> point of overlap. I'm not saying you should join, but I urge you to
> see if there's anything in what they do you might learn from - and
> vice versa.
>
> Best
> Jonathan Rees
> Science Commons
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