Follow Up to Species RDF Discussions

I appreciate all the insightful discussion about the Species RDF. :-)

I thought it best to think about the comments before responding.

I guess the issue can be summed up in the following way:

Can you create a lightweight representation of a species that contains what
most people need, but still retains the ability to link to a more complete
representation for those who may need to determine the attributes and
properties that are used to separate one species concept from another?

This more complete species document, in OWL or RDF, would help determine
which species concept is the best match for a given specimen?

A species is a sort of conceptualization and it is not always obvious or
generally accepted where the clear boundary between two species is.

I think it is possible to create documents that clear up what is meant by a
specific species identifier.

This will not end the discussion of what a species is, but it will make it
possible to determine if a particular specimen is a close match to the
concept as it is defined.

For those interested, I have new versions of these:

RDF Example  http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p.rdf

<http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p.rdf>Ontology
http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ont/txn.owl

<http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ont/txn.owl>Ontology Doc
http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ont/txn_doc/index.html

VOID              http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/ont/void.rdf

I also made an example RDF that tags various webpages to that species
concept.

http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/webpages/v6n7p.rdf

All these example RDF and OWL files are combined into one RDF file that can
be used to see how they fit together.

http://rdf.taxonconcept.org/taxonconcept.rdf

- Pete

P.S. I should not that only a small fraction of the millions of existing
species have an NCBI taxon ID. There are not even ID's for disease carrying
mosquitoes commonly found in North America.
      In addition, these ID's don't provide any information that helps you
determine what ID is the best match for a given specimen.

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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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