Design

Background:

Treatments are distinct, formal descriptions of taxa which are rich in citations to other objects and concepts (increasingly identified formally) of interest to the biodiversity. As a node of dense relations to other obejcts, treatments may be usefully represented as a graph using RDF.

Some frequently cited objects:

• Prior Treatments
• Materials: Specimens, DNA sequences, etc…
  • collection event
    • date
    • location (country, province, locality, often geocoded)
    • collector
  • deposition
    • institution
    • ID
• Taxon Names
• Publications
• Traits

Objective:

Develop a method to represent the data available in treatments in RDF, using as much as possible existing ontologies/vocabularies, creating terms/concepts in a "Treatment Ontology" where there is need. Such an RDF representation would be returned by Plazi when its http URIs for treatments are dereferenced and a RDF serialization is requested by the user agent.

Competency Questions

Design

Related Resources

• The TDWG Taxon Concept Transfer Scheme TCS is an approved albeit little used XML Schema for Taxon Concept structure and attributes. It will probably be re-examined and possible refashioned as an OWL ontology. See especially this tdwg-rdf thread.
• Outcome should conform to the Report of the TDWG Vocabulary Management Task Group (VoMaG) even if there is no intent to submit as a TDWG standard.