Hi Peter,
On 2 Dec 2009, at 02:40, Peter DeVries wrote:
I was thinking that the species itself should be a class so that
individuals
of that species would be instances of that class.
Probably another skos:Concept class.
So an individual species concept class like that for the Cougar
would be an
instance of a skos:Concept (SpeciesConcept) class and also be a
skos:Concept
class (Cougar) of it's own.
Individual animals would be instances of the skos:Concept class
(Cougar).
Two issues.
1. I don't think that individual animals should be typed as
skos:Concepts, but rather as something like ex:Specimen or ex:Animal.
So, the Cougar class should be a subclass of ex:Specimen or ex:Animal
rather than of skos:Concept. In the words of Bernard Vatant,
skos:Concepts are "library business objects" (or "taxonomist business
objects"?); Bob the cougar in the zoo next door doesn't seem to fit
that definition.
2. I'm not sure if it's wise to use the same URI for the Cougar
"concept" and the Cougar "class". I don't think that this "punning" is
against any spec, but it will cause endless head-scratching among
potential users of your data. It would be more straightforward to mint
a separate URI for the class, and relating it 1:1 to the species
concept using an appropriate property (there's probably one in UMBEL;
if not, mint your own -- maybe "speciesClass"). Since you own the URI
space anyway, minting new URIs would be cheap.
This kind of punning between concepts, things and classes is an
interesting issue, and I'm afraid that it's not yet well understood.
Avoiding it puts you on the safe side.
That being said, can you talk a bit about your motivation for wanting
to re-use the same URI?
Best,
Richard
This should work with OWL2 but I don't know how well it will work
with the
LOD.
Also I created a VERY preliminary OWL document that would contain a
much
more complete representation of the species.
My thoughts are that these OWL documents would be used to help
determine
what specimens are instances of what species concept.
The goal would be to provide an OWL document for those who need a more
complete description of what we mean by the URI, while
also providing a much lighter RDF representation that could be used
for
concept mapping etc.
However, I don't know if I am going about this in the right way.
Below are my VERY preliminary examples of what these OWL documents
might
look like.
The example has some attributes that I thought should be included in a
species document, but it does not have everything that would like to
eventually include.
http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/owlses/v6n7p/2009-12-01.owl
Doc's at http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/owlses/v6n7p/owl_doc/index.html
The common classes etc, would eventually be moved to a separate
ontology
that would be imported into each individual species ontology.
And these ontologies will need to be fixed so that they work
together, I
don't think they do right now.
Thanks in Advance, :-)
- Pete
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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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