Role of RDFa in OWL classes, Systems that create URI's classes but allow regular humans to add information about those classes, alternative classifications

Hi All,

I is is my understanding that if we want to setup a web resource that
defines owl classes you can't use RDFa markup.

For instance, if I wanted to mint an owl class for the taxon group
Mammalia, I would need to do that in one of the following ways.

1) An OWL ontology created with something like Protege
2) A RDF file like http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/v6n7p.rdf
3) Using one of the various systems like Virtuoso, OpenStructs etc.

This would be different that defining an instance of the class Taxon for
the Mammalia in RDFa

I thought I would just put this to the list to check if my understanding of
this is correct.

One option would be to write some custom application in Ruby on Rails but I
thought I would ask the list about other alternatives and what their
experiences are with them.

In the future we are looking into creating a system where various clades
like Mammalia, Felidae etc. are defined and allows less technical editors
to add and edit attributes that help define those groups.

One thing to note is that various groups recognize different taxonomic
clades so the species entailed within one family on DBpedia is often
different than
the species entailed in the Uniprot Taxonomy.

What we would like is to allow different groups to assign a given species
concept to different classifications depending on their analysis needs.

We have been able to do something like this with Protege but I think it
would be better to do this in a more user friendly way.

We have also been thinking of defining subproperties for skos:broader and
skos:narrower that could be used to link the taxonomic levels together.

:broaderTaxon and narrowerTaxon

This would make it clearer that the link is to a broader or narrower taxon.

In the past one of the leaders in the LOD community suggested creating a
separate predicate for these kinds of relations and I am thinking if these
subproperties would address that suggestion without creating to much
complication.

Respectfully,

- Pete

P.S. I am currently in Woods Hole MA working the the Eol.org and
GlobalNames.org. I hope to have a new RDF dump soon that includes links
between my taxa and the related EoL pages. In the past, this links was
incomplete. I will update the list when the new RDF dump is available.

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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
Email: pdevries@wisc.edu
TaxonConcept <http://www.taxonconcept.org/>  &
GeoSpecies<http://about.geospecies.org/> Knowledge
Bases
A Semantic Web, Linked Open Data <http://linkeddata.org/>  Project
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