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

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.

*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.bob@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Peter DeVries <pete.devries@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: ram@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
>



-- 
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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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