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

Hilmar Lapp hlapp at duke.edu
Mon Feb 23 20:49:30 CET 2009


On Feb 23, 2009, at 2:26 PM, Kevin Richards wrote:

> Was this particular question answered?

No, not yet.

>
> "2) Is there a TDWG vocabulary (in RDF or OWL) that has a relation for
> referring to a specimen record, or are you aware of another one that
> has this?"
>
> Is the Occurrence RDF vocab at http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/ 
> TaxonOccurrence what you are looking for?
> I'm not sure I fully understood what you are after, but have a look  
> and see if it matches your requirements.

Thanks for the link. It seems nearly identical to DwC or shares at  
least a lot of the terms, no? But it doesn't seem to have an  
appropriate relation either.

What I am looking for, formally speaking, is an object property that  
would have a specimen as its range, and hence allows me to relate a  
specimen record to some entity (a class or an individual). Am I  
making sense?

There are some pieces along those lines in the DwC terms, but they  
don't (seem to) connect:

- There are classes PreservedSpecimen, FossilSpecimen, and  
LivingSpecimen, but they don't have a supertype (other than  
owl:Thing) that you could make the range.

- There is a class Sample, but that doesn't have any of the Specimen  
classes as subtypes. Maybe that's correct since a sample and a  
specimen aren't really the same thing (rather, the former is obtained  
from the latter).

- There is an object property Sample-2008-11-19 (domain is the class  
'none'), but there is no further annotation as to what that property  
should mean.

- There are object properties LivingSpecimen-2008-11-19 and  
PreservedSpecimen-2008-11-19 that have PhysicalObject as their super- 
property (why not Specimen?), and there is FossilSpecimen-2008-11-19  
which has PreservedSpecimen (no date suffix) as super-property.

	-hilmar


>
> Kevin
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: tdwg-tag-bounces at lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag- 
> bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Hilmar Lapp
> Sent: Monday, 23 February 2009 11:04 a.m.
> To: Technical Architecture Group mailing list; rogerhyam Hyam
> Cc: Enrico Pontelli; Rutger A. Vos; Arlin Stoltzfus; nexml- 
> discuss at lists.sourceforge.net; Brandon Chisham
> Subject: [tdwg-tag] Embedding specimen (and other) annotations in  
> NeXML
>
> Hi Roger and everyone else involved in DwC and the core ontology,
>
> in preparation for the upcoming hackathon [1] here we've worked our
> way through a number of use-cases for attaching metadata to data
> elements in NeXML [2] in a way that is semantically defined. The
> results are here:
>
> http://evoinfo.nescent.org/Database_Interop_Hackathon/Metadata_Support
>
> If you can take a critical look specifically at the section on
> 'Specimens within collections' (http://tinyurl.com/djdby3) that'd be
> great.
>
> Specific questions related to that:
> 1) Is this using DarwinCore in a correct and/or sanctioned way?
>
> 2) Is there a TDWG vocabulary (in RDF or OWL) that has a relation for
> referring to a specimen record, or are you aware of another one that
> has this?
>
> 3) I could only find the XML schema for DarwinCore. Are there any
> plans for (or did I miss the existence of) a corresponding ontology
> defined in OWL or RDF, similar Dublin Core (which has a RDF ontology
> at http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1 and DCterms ontology at http:// 
> purl.org/dc/terms)
> .
>
> 4) It wasn't immediately clear how one would use the TDWG core
> ontology for doing the same thing in RDF (or OWL) - is this ontology
> supposed to be used yet, and are there usage examples, or does someone
> have a recommendation for how one would write the same example using
> the core ontology?
>
> I know it's a rather tiny subset of DwC that we're using here but
> that's only a start and one use-case.
>
> Of course, any other feedback to or suggestions for this or any of the
> other stuff on that page is welcome too!
>
> Cheers,
>
>         -hilmar
>
> [1] http://evoinfo.nescent.org/Database_Interop_Hackathon
> [2] http://nexml.org
>
> --
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> : Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
> ===========================================================
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
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