Re: Biological Taxonomy Vocabulary 0.1

> Plain text for divisions can lead to spell problems (not only caps) and
> the information won't be wrong, but also putting all species names in a
> list is not possible. How would you address that?

The same could be said for foaf:name. FOAF doesn't have a big list of name
URIs that you can choose from, and nor should it. URIs are good, but
literals have their place in RDF too.

> In Authority you state what I got as the citation. Will you link to any
> journal database or have a local citation list? Just saying "Linnaeus,
> 1758" is not enough for most cases.

A taxonomic authority is similar to a citation, but it's not the same.
It's actually closer to a traditional namespacing mechanism. It
effectively qualifies the binomial term being used, so "Homo sapiens
(Linnaeus, 1758)" means "Homo sapiens, as would have been understood by
Linnaeus in 1758".

For a citation that is, say, a paper on the species in question, then
biol:seeAlso can be used. For a citation justifying your claim that Foo is
of species Bar, then you're getting into reification territory.

-- 
Toby Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Friday, 9 May 2008 15:27:30 UTC