- From: Leigh Dodds <leigh.dodds@talis.com>
- Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:19:07 +0000
- To: Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com>
- Cc: Peter DeVries <pete.devries@gmail.com>, public-lod <public-lod@w3.org>, dmozzherin <dmozzherin@gmail.com>
Hi Bob, 2009/12/4 Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com>: > On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 10:14 PM, Peter DeVries <pete.devries@gmail.com> wrote: > ... > In the end, for ecological observations, it is likely that it will be > necessary to be able to talk about several species at once; e.g. when > it is important to determine if there were two particular species > observed at the same time and place. To me, this alone suggests that > important applications will need a merged ontology at least as to the > species (concepts). There is fair concensus that the number of known > species is roughly 1.8M---so concepts perhaps 2-3 times that (???). > Also, it is well and often pointed out that for even simple reasoning, > one may have to align the species concepts, not the names, to decide > whether occurrences reported in different data sets are really talking > about the same kind of thingie---which is why you and TDWG model > concepts. So from that I deduce that for interests of people who > study communities and their interactions, rather than those who study > taxonomic groups, making a species (concept) be a class instead of (or > in addition to) an instance will lead to as many as several millions > of classes (or several hundreds of million if we find the other 28M > species before we destroy them all....). So I guess I believe that > modeling species (concepts) as classes is not scalable. Isn't this what the TWDG ontology does though? Looking at the definition of a TaxonConcept [1] I see that its a defined as a Class. This is confirmed by this example [2] which shows the concept for Puma concolor as being a sub-class of TaxonConcept, and the Puma concolor concept is itself a class. I did some digging around and found that: * Dbpedia and Uniprot model taxa as instances, as does the RDF data coming from the Ubio LSID resolver * The ETHAN ontology, and the TWDG TaxonConcept model (AIUI), both model taxa as Classes * Peter's species concept examples use skos:Concepts which are themselves instances rather than classes. * OpenCyc uses Collections which seem to be a little of both :) Obviously there's no right answer here, but just wanted to get some clarification on your comments. [1]. http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonConcept [2]. http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-ontology/source/browse/trunk/docs/publishing_taxa/full_example.rdf [3]. http://spire.umbc.edu/ont/ethan.php Cheers, L. -- Leigh Dodds Programme Manager, Talis Platform Talis leigh.dodds@talis.com http://www.talis.com
Received on Tuesday, 15 December 2009 12:19:36 UTC