[tdwg-tag] Lobbing grenades: a challenge

[joel sachs]

Rod,

On Tue, 20 Sep 2011, Roderic Page 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?

How I would love for this to happen. I've created a page on the wiki to 
inventory the data that we'll probably want to load:
http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/DataInventory

I'll start populating this in the coming days, but invite you (and anyone 
else who knows of biodiversity triples ready for loading) to beat me to 
it.

Thanks for the challenge -
Joel.




>
> 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
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>
>