Re: Species Concept Mapping RDF fixes and question, should the species be represented as a class? Class SpeciesConcept => Class Species Cougar

Hi Richard,

> 
> 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.


Well, couldn't your questioning put the other way round? I thought that Peter was indeed starting from items that are very much "taxonomist business objects", hence very easy to represent as concepts.

And in fact, while I understand that it is not very intuitive to have Bob the cougar as a skos:Concept (even though it is technically allowed), I see less problems for dealing this way with the class of cougars...

Best,

Antoine

> 
> 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
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>> Pete DeVries
>> Department of Entomology
>> University of Wisconsin - Madison
>> 445 Russell Laboratories
>> 1630 Linden Drive
>> Madison, WI 53706
>> GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
>> About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 

Received on Wednesday, 2 December 2009 16:01:31 UTC