Re: Bioschemas.org to define biodiversity-related markup

Hi Frank,

This looks really interesting, thanks for bringing it up. I was trying 
to find out how the interaction between EoL and schema.org was working 
and am wondering if you (or someone else!) could shed some light on this?

As you suggested in the below, I checked the google beluga 
<https://www.google.fr/search?dcr=0&ei=ml74WajPMMzWUabjqvAF&q=beluga&oq=beluga&gs_l=psy-ab.3...19519.20929.0.20945.6.3.0.0.0.0.93.93.1.1.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..5.1.92...0j0i131k1.0.AGNziTItYzc> 
search result and do see the line "Length: 4.2 m (Adult) Encyclopedia of 
Life"

If I try to find where that info comes from, and head to EoL, I can 
reach the page http://eol.org/pages/328541/overview, and follow the "see 
all traits" link to http://eol.org/pages/328541/data which contains the 
JSON-LD.

I trimmed it down to extract the relevant bit, updated the id to be a 
string as per https://github.com/EOL/tramea/issues/352, and pasted it in 
the JSON playground mostly to make sure it was working as expected: 
http://tinyurl.com/yadam6nj

I am missing the link of how the following happens:
- the measurement type points to 
http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/VT_0001256, which is body length. The 
schema.org/predicate value is also "body length (VT)". How is this 
understood and displayed as Length on the Google result?
- Similar question for the actual value and units, which are "4249.83" 
and "mm" respectively. Is Google doing some sort of unit 
conversion/roundup for display?
- Trophic level on EoL is "carnivore", but Google displays "Carnivorous"
etc

Or am I looking at the wrong source for the markup?

Cheers,
Melanie






On 10/11/2017 15:17, Franck Michel wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I've just joined the Bioschemas.org community following some 
> discussions I had with Alasdair Gray whom I met at ISWC in Vienna, and 
> I'd like to start a new discussion thread.
>
> So, just to start, a few words about me. I'm a CNRS research engineer, 
> I work at the I3S laboratory in France, in particular with the Wimmics 
> research team led by Fabien Gandon. I'm currently involved in some 
> activities related to the publication of taxonomic information as 
> Linked Data [1]. In this context, I've met the Biodiversity 
> Information Standards community (TDWG) that is increasingly 
> considering SW standards, LD publication and web pages markup. This is 
> a domain where, I think, it would be relevant for Bioschemas.orgto get 
> involved.
>
> There exist lots of web portals reporting observations, traits and 
> other data about all sorts of living organisms. Encyclopedia of Life 
> <http://eol.org/> (EoL) and the Global Biodiversity Information 
> Facility <https://www.gbif.org/> (GBIF) are some of the most well 
> known. Markup questions are actively considered in this field, for 
> instance EoL web pages embed schemas.org-based JSON-LD descriptions 
> that Google leverages to enrich their snippets: e.g. if you google 
> beluga 
> <https://www.google.fr/search?dcr=0&ei=ml74WajPMMzWUabjqvAF&q=beluga&oq=beluga&gs_l=psy-ab.3...19519.20929.0.20945.6.3.0.0.0.0.93.93.1.1.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..5.1.92...0j0i131k1.0.AGNziTItYzc> 
> you shall see 'Encyclopedia of Life' mentions in the snippet providing 
> average weight and size data. For now, this seems to be an 
> "individual" initiative between EoL and Google/schemas.org, but it 
> would make sense if this was part of a broader reflection led by 
> Bioschemas.org.
>
> My opinion is that fostering the use of common markup by these portals 
> could be very effective in helping the biodiversity community to 
> discover information and figure out new data integration 
> scenarios.Within Bioschemas.org, we could define profiles to account 
> for biodiversity-related information.Taxonomic registers are used as 
> the backbone of many web portals, apps and databases related to 
> biodiversity, agronomy and agriculture.For instance, EoL and GBIF both 
> rely on the Catalog of Life <http://www.catalogueoflife.org/> 
> taxonomy. Therefore, we could start with the definition of a profile 
> to describe a taxon and the related scientific and vernacular names 
> thereof. Then, this could be extended with the representation of 
> traits (characteristics of biological organisms), observations, 
> occurrence data, conservation status (e.g. endangered) etc. There 
> already exist vocabularies for such data such as the well-adopted 
> Darwin Core terms.
>
> As a quick example, consider the web page describing the common 
> dolphin on the web site of the french Museum of Natural History: 
> https://inpn.mnhn.fr/espece/cd_nom/60878?lg=en. This page could come 
> with a JSON-LD desciption looking like this: 
> https://github.com/frmichel/taxref-ld/blob/master/bioschemas-org-example.json
> This example is naive and very succinct, and there are lots of things 
> to discuss and decide. Besides, I've just registered on the mailing 
> yesterday, so it may not fit with good practices that you guys have 
> already agreed upon. Sorry if this is the case. Nevertheless, my point 
> is basically to bootstrap the discussion and see if the community is 
> willing to endorse this initiative. If this is the case, we should 
> probably involve people from the biodiversity community: Darwin Core 
> experts, EoL/GBIF representatives etc. But that will come in time.
>
> I look forward to further discussions.
> Regards,
>    Franck.
>
> [1] Michel F., Gargominy O., Tercerie S. & Faron-Zucker C. (2017). A 
> Model to Represent Nomenclatural and Taxonomic Information as Linked 
> Data. Application to the French Taxonomic Register, TAXREF. In 
> Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Semantics for 
> Biodiversity (S4BioDiv) co-located with ISWC 2017 vol. 1933. Vienna, 
> Austria. CEUR.
>
> -- 
> signature
>  
> Franck MICHEL
> CNRS research engineer
>  +33 (0)492 96 5004
> franck.michel@cnrs.fr <mailto:franck.michel@cnrs.fr>
>
>  
>
> Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, *Inria* - I3S - UMR 7271
> 930 route des Colles - Bât. Les Templiers
> BP 145 - 06903 Sophia Antipolis CEDEX - France
> Tel. +33 (0)4 9294 2680, Fax : +33 (0)4 9294 2898
>