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

On Jan 12, 2012, at 1:08 PM, Peter DeVries wrote:

> 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.

RDFa can markup pretty much any RDF, but you might not always be able to use the shortcuts. For instance, using @inlist can easily create an RDF collection, but OWL also requires that each element be marked with owl:Class AFAIKR.

In the past, I've tried to markup my OWL documents using HTML+RDFa, RDF/XML and Turtle, available via content negotiation from the ontology URI.

> 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.

Check out the rdf-rdfa Ruby gem; it has an RDF writer that uses Haml, so it can deal with quite custom output. You can try it on your favorite ontology using my RDF Distiller (http://rdf.greggkellogg.net/distiller), just select the output format as "RDFa" or "HTML".

Gregg

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

Received on Thursday, 12 January 2012 22:19:59 UTC