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

Hi Peter,

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.

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 12:12:37 UTC