Example Species Description Document for Linked Data and the Semantic web

I have a mock up of a species description document. It is in XHTML5.
Validates both as XHTML and as RDF.

http://www.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p.xhtml

You can also view it via the LOD uri burner:

The document uriburner
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/about/html/http://www.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p.xhtml

The entity in uriburner
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/about/html/http/www.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p

This addresses a number of data integration and semantic web problems with
species.

1) Scientific names and their related identifiers link to a particular
taxonomic hypothesis which often changes. For instance Felis concolor ->
Puma concolor.
2) The information that serves as documentation of the species, the type
specimen(s) and the original publication, are often difficult to access.
3) It provides additional informative supporting information about the
species in a machine readable way.
4) It improves the documentation of variation in a species over time and
space.

The goal is to create framework to help stabilize the "meaning" of a
particular species.

It was done in a relatively bland way because these documents are not really
for end users but to provide stable informative identifiers to link data
together.

A fully implemented version of this document would provides resolvable, and
informative definition of what is "meant" by a particular species URI.

Ideally this file will contain links to the type specimen, original
description and provide additional curated information.

I think I have done this is a way that can easily plug into the work and
vocabularies being developed by EOL, GBIF and TWDG.

I also set it up in a "portable" namespace so some larger group could take
it over.

The RDF is a little incomplete because I am hoping on working with related
groups so their data is available via a URI.

For instance I have the globalnames xml url, but it might be better to have
the names linked to RDF via a URI.

I look forward to your comments and suggestions :-)

- Pete

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Pete DeVries <http://spiders.entomology.wisc.edu/pjd/index.html>
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
Email: pdevries@wisc.edu
GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <http://species.geospecies.org/>
About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <http://about.geospecies.org/>
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