On Dec 1, 2009, at 9:14 PM, Peter DeVries wrote:
Hi Bob,
I came about this after it was suggested to me that a species might
be best represented as a class.
It also occurred to me that an ontology that works to describe
mosquito species would probably be very different than an ontology
used to describe members of the cat family.
What I thought was that there are times when you want to treat a
species as an instance and other time you want to treat it as a class.
In any civilized ontology language, a class is an instance. Use OWL 2
from now on.
Pat
Thinking out loud here.
The lightweight representations shown in this example
http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p.rdf
are used when you just need something simple that gives you the
basic information and maps concepts.
However, it really does not document what you mean by the URI. By
that I mean, it does not provide any information that will allow you
to
determine what species concept you should apply for a given specimen.
For that you will need something more complex, that can be loaded as
needed. Something more like this representation.
http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/owlses/v6n7p/2009-12-01.owl (Initially
an individual file made with Protege)
How would these be used?
Lets say that an individual Cougar was observed within the
boundaries of the state of Wisconsin.
That individual is an instance, however, from that you should be
able to reason that the species
http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p
was observed within the State of Wisconsin.
This should allow you to then run queries on species observed in a
particular geographic location as shown in these examples.
http://about.geospecies.org/sparql.xhtml
You should also be able to make other assertions at the species
concept level based on data from collections of individuals.
For example, the mosquito Culex territans femalesfeedPrimarily on
Anurans (frogs and toads)
How do I determine if the cat I have captured is Puma concolor vs
Puma yagouaroundi? (or another less obvious example)
See http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p and
http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/Hq5OE
and from there get the related owl documents. The owl documents
should provide some information that will allow you to determine
which concept is the best match for the captured specimen.
At least that is what I would like to do. :-)
- Pete
On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Bob Morris <morris....@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Peter DeVries
<pete.devr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi LOD'ers,
>[...]
> 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).
>[...]
Umm, if every species concept is a class, about how many classes, in
your estimate, would there be in a comprehensive ontology?
--Bob
--
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science (nominally retired)
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: r...@cs.umb.edu
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466
--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
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