Re: Biological Taxonomy Vocabulary 0.1

On 7 Oct 2008, at 10:03, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:

> I'm a latecomer to this discussion, and not a biologist, so sorry  
> if this is
> silly, but I thought Uniprot had a pretty uptodate taxonomy of  
> species?


The Biological Taxonomy Vocabulary takes a completely different  
approach from UniProt, uBio, etc.

Look at FOAF. The FOAF spec doesn't contain instance data - that is,  
the spec doesn't define URIs for all the billions of people alive on  
Earth. Instead, it defines a few dozen terms like foaf:name, which  
other people can use to create instance data. Similarly, Dublin Core  
doesn't define URIs for millions of books, but does define a small  
number of properties which are useful for describing books (and  
films, music, etc).

Existing biological ontologies have tended to focus on defining URIs  
for tens of thousands of different species. The Biological Taxonomy  
Vocabulary doesn't do that - instead it defines a smaller set of  
terms (less than twenty) that people can use to define species  
themselves.

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

Received on Tuesday, 7 October 2008 22:11:09 UTC