TDWG is pleased to announce the commencement of the Public Review of the Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) and Life Sciences Identifier (LSID) Applicability Statements. Applicability Statements provide guidance for use of external standards within the TDWG domain. The GUID statement provides general recommendations and the LSID one covers the specific GUID currently recommended by TDWG. Since being officially submitted, the Applicability Statements have undergone a peer review, a review by the TDWG Executive and multiple revisions.
Open Invitation: We invite all who may contribute and/or consume biodiversity information to examine this proposed applicability statement during the Public Review period from 23rd October till at least 23rd November 2009.
How to Participate: You can participate in the review of the GUID-LSID AS in two ways; either through lodging a comment through TDWG’s Open Journal System, or you can take the Microsoft Word document and edit it with track changes and resubmit it to the GUID-LSID AS Wiki space.
You can post comments to the Open Journal System (which may be anonymous) at http://www.tdwg.org/stdtrack/article/view/150. The abstract is displayed and on the right hand side of the page is a link to add a comment. Please note: you must be registered and logged in to the TDWG web site to post a comment, however registration is free. Down the bottom of the page, there is a link to download the complete applicability statement.
You can also comment direct in a copy of the document as follows:
· At the previous URL, download a copy of the Microsoft Word format document.
· Once you have downloaded it, turn on track changes and make your notes and comments.
· Submit that file at http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/GUID/GUIDAndLSIDASReview.
Please DO NOT add any comments to the Wiki page, comment only through the two methods outlined above.
Questions about the process should be directed to me at ben(dot)richardson(at)dec.wa.gov.au.
Please share this opportunity for public comment and review with others you think may be interested.
Acknowledgements: I’d like to thank the authors, the anonymous reviewers and the members of the Executive Committee for their contribution to the document. In addition, the guidance of Lee Belbin through the review process has been invaluable and greatly appreciated.
Links:
· GUID and LSID AS comment area in OJS http://www.tdwg.org/stdtrack/article/view/150.
· LSID Wiki space: http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/GUID/GUIDAndLSIDASReview
· LSID Resolution Project home page: http://lsids.sourceforge.net/
· LSID Specification: http://lsids.sourceforge.net/quick-links/lsid-spec/
Please accept my apology if you’ve received this multiple times from various mailing lists.
Regards,
Ben Richardson
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http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf#hasOwner
specifies two classes in its range: Person and Institution,
The formal semantics of rdfs:range entails that the actual range of
an object property is the intersection of the named rdfs:range
classes.
I believe this all entails that the only owner of a Collection is
something that is both a Person and an Institution.
Also, since these classes are not(?) defined as disjoint, the result
is that any set of triples
Roger rdfs:type Person
C hasOwner Roger
turns Roger into an Institution
Likewise
Kew rdfs:type Institution
C hasOwner Kew
turns Kew into a Person
I could be wrong about all this, perhaps unless I too am an
Institution, since, in my experience, Institutions rarely admit to
being wrong. (Uh, oh, better not go there... :-) )
Bob Morris
p.s.
This also suggests that the stylesheet human.xsl is somewhat
recalcitrant, since the html rendering of
http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf only sees Institution
as the range of hasOwner
--
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science (nominally retired)
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herberia
email: ram(a)cs.umb.edu
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPushhttp://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466
In drafting an RDF representation of MRTG[1], I am struggling with how
close to stay to the DC and DwC minimalist style of ontology
architecture. I find this well justified by the sentence "For example,
though the data types and constraints are not provided in the term
definitions, recommendations are made about how to restrict the values
where appropriate" in the DwC introduction[2].
What I'm struggling with is how much to slant MRTG---which uses a lot
of DwC--more toward OWL or more towards only RDF. See [3] for
discussion of the dillemma raised when you put any of the DC or DwC
RDF files into Protege4 or WonderWeb, the Manchester OWL
Validator[4]. Roughly speaking, I took [3] to be the Manchester and
Stanford axis of OWL to be saying, "In the future, don't expect to
talk about OWL without stronger typing." {As I understand DwC/RDF,
this all is accomplished by declaring terms to be mainly rdf:Property
with the only typification coming from the assertions using the
predicate dwcattributes:organizedInClass }.
So my questions are possibly:
1. What committment does TAG have to OWL
2. Has TAG examined the applicability to TDWG of the W3 OWL 2
recommendations recently advanced to the Proposed Recommendation stage
[4], [5], or its relatives.
3. If no to 2, is there a plan to do so? Against what use cases?
A few months ago, Roger seemed to wax enthusiastic about Knowledge
Representation and reasoning on biodiversity data, but I haven't seen
much traffic about what are the modeling requirements to support that,
or whether TAG has a plan to move that way.
Bob Morris
[1] MRTG 0.8 http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.8
[2] DwC intro http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm
[3] p4-feedback thread on rdf:Property
https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/p4-feedback/2009-October/002448.html
[4] WonderWeb http://www.mygrid.org.uk/OWL/Validator
[5] OWL2 Overview http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/PR-owl2-syntax-20090922/
[5] OWL2 rdf semantics
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/PR-owl2-rdf-based-semantics-20090922/
--
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science (nominally retired)
UMASS-Boston
Associate, Harvard University Herberia
email: ram(a)cs.umb.edu
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPushhttp://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466
Dear all,
I wanted to share my little servlet that validates a meta.xml
descriptor for darwin core archives.
This is a simple xml file that provides the information about the
layout of text data files, mainly which column represents which darwin
core term.
People often want to handcraft darwin core archives as it is so simple
to dump data straight from a database into text files. This tool helps
to make sure that the descriptor, which usually is a static write-it-
once file, is valid without knowing how to use oxygen or other xml
tools.
http://ecat-ws.gbif.org/dwca-validator/
regards,
Markus
The TDWG Executive Committee announces the official ratification of Darwin
Core (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm) as a TDWG standard.
Darwin Core joins four other TDWG standards- http://www.tdwg.org/standards/
that provide a reference for sharing information about biodiversity. Lead
author, John Wieczorek, and his co-authors, Markus Döring, Renato de
Giovanni, Tim Robertson, and Dave Vieglais have done an amazing job in
writing, organizing, and dealing with feedback during the review process. We
can only have a small insight into the effort that John and his team have
invested in Darwin Core.
We also appreciate the work that Gail Kampmeier has done as Review Manager
since her appointment in February 2009. There was an initial peer review
followed by two months of public review, punctuated by ongoing discussions
and periodic updating of the draft standard now being ratified by the TDWG
Executive Committee.
John, Markus, Renato, Tim, Dave and Gail deserve contributions of good
French wine in Montpellier! Thank you and congratulations to all who
contributed.
Donald Hobern, Chairman, TDWG.
