Re: An introduction of LOD features of EUNIS

Dear Soren,

I took a quick look at the EUNIS database. Considering this year is the International Year of Biodiversity can you tell me if similar projects exist for other geographical regions or any projects of a global nature?

Milton Ponson
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--- On Sat, 6/5/10, Søren Roug <soren.roug@eea.europa.eu> wrote:

From: Søren Roug <soren.roug@eea.europa.eu>
Subject: An introduction of LOD features of EUNIS
To: public-lod@w3.org
Date: Saturday, June 5, 2010, 9:16 AM

Hi lod-public,

Peter de Vries alerted me to the presence of this mailing list, and since 
you're currently discussing species modeling, I thought I would add my 2 
cents.

I'm the maintainer of a site called EUNIS, which is used by the European 
Commission to determine whether species, habitat types or sites need a change 
in legislation and protection. There are about 200.000 species in the 
database. We have over the last couple of months given it an overhaul and 
added some linked data functionality. It is still a work in progress, and 
we'll continue the improvements. The way we have implemented Linked Data is to 
look at the accept header, and then either send text/html or 
application/rdf+xml without a redirection. This means that for e.g. 
http://eunis.eea.europa.eu/species/1038 the HTML and the RDF output is the 
same URL.

A note about our semantics. We're not using the predicate 
skos:closeMatch like Pete. We have created two predicates.
1.       sameSynonym, which links a binomial name and author to the same 
binomial name and author in the foreign database. (taking into account 
different spellings and abbreviations). The purpose is to validate that our 
name is used by at least one other database.
2.       sameSpecies, which links from a EUNIS accepted name to an accepted 
name in the foreign database. The side-effect is that the species name might 
change when you follow the link. sameSpecies is a sub-property of owl:sameAs.
 
We also have negative matches: notSameSynonym and notSameSpecies. These are 
used when there is a high likelyhood of assuming it is the same species, and a 
maintainer has determined it is not. 

Practical examples:

Danaus plexippus (Monarch butterfly) http://eunis.eea.europa.eu/species/90910
Canis lupus (Gray wolf) http://eunis.eea.europa.eu/species/90910
The Polish site Lasy Janowskie http://eunis.eea.europa.eu/species/90910

Best regards,

Søren Roug
European Environment Agency