Re: Guerilla science: what can we do in 10 days?

Toby,

This is awesome. We can combine this data (conservation status of 46,600 
species) with the Biological Inventories of the World's Protected Areas 
[1] to, for example, query for the vulnerable species in each park.

PREFIX purl: <http://purl.org/NET/biol/ns#>
PREFIX life: <http://life.buzzword.org.uk/2009/terms/vocab#>
PREFIX lifeCat: <http://life.buzzword.org.uk/2009/terms/categories#>
PREFIX bioinv: <http://bioinventory.ice.ucdavis.edu/2009/elements#>

SELECT DISTINCT ?population ?occurrence
WHERE {
             ?population life:assessment ?assessment .
             ?assessment life:assessmentCategory lifeCat:VU .
             ?population life:definingTaxonomy ?x .
             ?x purl:name ?y .
             ?occurrence bioinv:latin_name ?y .
}

Of greater significance, we can determine which species of concern are not 
protected in any park. And the IUCN data should be of high utility in 
citizen science monitoring.

Note that the above query is matching on scientific name, an imprecise 
heuristic. The Bioinventories database has ITIS TSNs for many, but not 
close to all, occurrence records. We can use the new ITIS web service [2], 
or maybe the SPARQL endpoint [3] to Allan Hollander's species resolver [4] 
to get TSNs for the IUCN data. Matching on TSNs could then be the first 
thing we try. When that fails, we can try to match on scientific name + 
authorship.

My guess is that even in the best of possible LSID worlds, there will 
always be cases where heuristic approaches will be necessary for 
determining species matches.

A couple of other things:

1. Have you considered putting the species name inside the URLs for the 
pages? This would simplify human interaction with the data; would there be 
a downside?

2. I notice that the URI
http://life.buzzword.org.uk/2009/terms/categories#assessment
does not yet exist. This, of course, does not preclude us from using it in 
data and queries. To me, this nicely illustrates that a URI can abdicate 
one responsibility (resolution mechanism), while still performing another 
(vocabulary term).

Sincerely,
Joel.

1. http://bioinventory.ice.ucdavis.edu/rdf/ , records undergoing change.
2. http://www.itis.gov/ITISWebService/
3. http://ecoinfo.ice.ucdavis.edu/taxa/sparql
4. e.g. http://ecoinfo.ice.ucdavis.edu/taxa/Gorilla_gorilla



On Thu, 21 May 2009, Toby A Inkster wrote:

> On 21 May 2009, at 20:03, joel sachs wrote:
>
>> I'm mainly hoping for pointers to biodiversity data in RDF
>
>
> About a month ago I started an experiment in converting the IUCN Red List to 
> RDF. The IUCN's data licensing policies are not entirely clear, and I've not 
> been able to get a good answer from them as to whether this is OK, so until I 
> hear differently, this data and the URLs used should be considered unstable. 
> (If anyone here has contacts within IUCN who could clarify things, I'd love 
> to hear from them.)
>
> Anyway, this URL represents the population of Western Gorillas:
>
> 	http://life.buzzword.org.uk/2009/populations/9404#population
>
> The species is:
>
> 	http://life.buzzword.org.uk/2009/populations/9404#taxonomy
>
> And their IUCN assessment is:
>
> 	http://life.buzzword.org.uk/2009/populations/9404#assessment
>
> -- 
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
>
>

Received on Monday, 25 May 2009 13:39:27 UTC