[tdwg-tag] Lobbing grenades: a challenge

[Roderic Page]

Dear Bob,

I guess I was looking specific examples. Imagine you are selling this to someone who hasn't drunk the Kool Aid regarding RDF and the Semantic Web -- or worse, did drink, survived, and is now an ex addict ;)

Within our field (broadly defined), for example, I can see XML being useful to exchange semi-structured data (the NLM DTD for publications, Darwin Core for specimens, RSS feeds from journals, etc.). These are concrete examples that one could point to (although XML is hard to love, and is probably overused - JSON is what the kewl kids are using http://stereolambda.com/2010/03/19/why-is-json-so-popular-developers-want-out-of-the-syntax-business/ ).

So, where are our actual success stories...?

Regards

Rod

On 20 Sep 2011, at 11:14, Bob Morris wrote:

> How would you answer your question about
> 
> 1. XML
> 2. XML validated by XML-Schema
> 3. CSV
> 4. ASCII dumps of relational data
> 
> If there is an answer, X,  for one of those, an answer to your
> challenge will, often, be that RDF accomplishes things like X but
> without difficult D, for various values of D.
> 
> It's also arguable, that the formal semantics available to the RDF
> stack and other ontology-based data representation schemes, allows the
> building hypothesis testing software, sometimes more easily than, for
> example, data mining. The biomedical community has been doing that for
> 30 years or more. Most other sciences are just now getting with the
> program.
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:40 AM, Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
>> It's morning and the coffee hasn't quite kicked in yet, but reading through
>> recent TDWG TAG posts, and mindful of the upcoming meeting in New Orleans
>>  (which sadly I won't be attending) I'm seeing a mismatch between the amount
>> of effort being expended on discussions of vocabularies, ontologies, etc.
>> and the concrete results we can point to.
>> Hence, a challenge:
>> "What new things have we learnt about biodiversity by converting
>> biodiversity data into RDF?"
>> I'm not saying we can't learn new things, I'm simply asking what have we
>> learnt so far?
>> Since around 2006 we have had literally millions of triples in the wild
>> (uBio, ION, Index Fungorum, IPNI, Catalogue of Life, more recently
>> Biodiversity Collections Index, Atlas of Living Australia, World Register of
>> Marine Species, etc.), most of these using the same vocabulary. What new
>> inferences have we made?
>> Let's make the challenge more concrete. Load all these data sources into a
>> triple store (subchallenge - is this actually possible?). Perhaps add other
>> RDF sources (DBpedia, Bio2RDF, CrossRef). What novel inferences can we make?
>> 
>> I may, of course, simply be in "grumpy old arse" mode, but we have millions
>> of triples in the wild and nothing to show for it. I hope I'm not alone in
>> wondering why...
>> 
>> Regards
>> Rod
>> ---------------------------------------------------------
>> Roderic Page
>> Professor of Taxonomy
>> Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
>> College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
>> Graham Kerr Building
>> University of Glasgow
>> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
>> 
>> Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
>> Tel: +44 141 330 4778
>> Fax: +44 141 330 2792
>> AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
>> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
>> Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
>> Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
>> Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> tdwg-tag mailing list
>> tdwg-tag at lists.tdwg.org
>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Robert A. Morris
> 
> Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
> UMASS-Boston
> 100 Morrissey Blvd
> Boston, MA 02125-3390
> IT Staff
> Filtered Push Project
> Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology
> Harvard University
> 
> 
> email: morris.bob at gmail.com
> web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
> web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
> http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
> phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
> 

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html

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