[tdwg-tag] Re-organisation of TDWG Ontology: Danger silencewill== acquiescence!

Peter DeVries pete.devries at gmail.com
Sun May 17 21:35:54 CEST 2009


1) Seeing data marked up in a standard can make it a lot easier to figure
out how to implement that standard yourself. It is difficult to see if you
are interpreting the standard correctly, and you sometimes find mistakes inthe
examples like the one listed above.

For instance, I saw an example where the Datum was recorded as "epsg:4326".
I understood that it should be
interpreted as "WGS84". But, I did not expect that Datum would appear in
that form, and I would not have
written a parser to recognize that.

In regards to RDF/OWL, having a sample data set allows you to see if you can
ask the questions that you want to.

These were the reason's why I was looking for some sample data a while back.

For data that is going to be used in triple stores and used with SPARQL, it
seems best to replace literals with URI's as much as possible. The system
seems faster, and more predictable. It appears the system finds a long but
standard URI, preferable to a string of characters. This make sense if you
think about how this is stored, but it is the opposite of how most people
think.

I am a little concerned about adopting a standard which people have not
actually tried to work with.

2) It might be advantageous to split out some parts to speed this up.

If we could come up with a proposed representation for location, it
would not be too difficult to generate some sample data sets that people
could then test.

In the testing phase, we should see if there are any problems with the
standard, and what kinds of errors people make when trying to produce
records that comply with the standards.

Also, we might solicit feedback from some of the other people in the
Semantic Web community. This might help improve the location standard and
improve the chances that it might get more widely adopted.

Finally, we produce example code in several different programming languages
and environments that demonstrates how to produce the location markup. For
instance, code that creates location records in
Ruby on Rails, Python, Java, maybe even FileMaker. That code could then be
added as libraries for
each of those languages.

If we have a standard table format for location, then the data can be output
in a number of different formats including variations of OWL/RDF based on
different ontologies.

Maybe something like:

Simple RDF   - with ontology              (data mixes easily with other data
sets)
OWL/RDF      - with DL ontology         (may only work with DarwinCore Data)
OWL/RDF      - experimental ontology (things that people would like to try
without complete ratification)

- Pete

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 4:46 AM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>wrote:

>
> I had said:
>
> > So, the point is, there are MANY MANY aspects of
> > ZooBank that are known to be non-functional, or
> > mis-functional, and (as in this case) there are many
> > opportunities for users to enter information incorrectly or
> > into the wrong fields (the doi obviously should have been in
> > the identifier field; not the URL field).
>
> I want to retract that last bit!  I just now discovered that the problem is
> with the code behind the user interface, and NOT the user putting
> information in the wrong field!  My apologies for the misleading statement
> (unintentional, though it was).  Of course, there is still ample
> opportunity
> on the ZooNBank website for someone to enter the wrong information in the
> wrong field, but the specific case pointed out by Rod was not an example of
> such.
>
> Aloha,
> Rich
>
>
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> tdwg-tag mailing list
> tdwg-tag at lists.tdwg.org
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>



-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
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