[pcplantdb] RDF and Wikis

Bear Kaufmann bear at ursine-design.com
Thu Jan 12 01:54:11 EST 2006


John Schinnerer wrote:

>Did, briefly...couldn't make heads or tails from what was on those web 
>pages.  However your description of intent and application below is very 
>helpful.
>  
>
Yes. I was heading out and provided little explanation of what I did.
If you want to explore it, try looking at Classes. Then say look at 
Plant. Unfortunately this documentation system "flattens" the whole 
thing, but you can see the parents of the classes (Superclasses) when 
you view a class. Or try individuals and look at Cucurbita_moschata, one 
of a few plants where I tried to describe it with the schema, and 
develop what was lacking.
I've appended this letter with the current subclasses of the ontology. 
It's not fully organized, and would probably end up with parts falling 
into very broad categories (States, Conditions, Organisms, Construction, 
GeographicArea, etc). I worked from the Eden schema, as well as USDA 
Plants, started to add soil classifications from a USDA Soil 
Classification workbook, etc.

>I like it.
>As far as I can make it out at a quick read, you pretty clearly indicate 
>how it would support multiple goals in our project.
>That's good.
>One of those goals is the IMO very important one of providing an 
>extensible framework for "guiding" user input in as structured of ways 
>as we find necessary.
>  
>
Yes. Matter of fact I was envisioning something like Google Suggest (not 
to jump on the AJAX bandwagon, :-), which could guess what someone was 
typing, and suggest terms in the ontology. There's an OWL property 
called "sameAs", so terms that were the same, but where we use a 
different term, could guide the user saying: "We use this term x instead 
of y, do you feel x conveys what you mean well enough? Otherwise, check 
this box to submit a suggestion for extensions to the schema." Similarly 
unique terms could get placed into a queue to be incorporated into the 
schema, or be assigned a "sameAs" property.

>For what afaik we have said we are trying to do, a wiki is clearly not 
>at all even a little bit suitable.  I thought we'd been through all that 
>already long ago.
>  
>
Heh. True.

>Am a bit surprised to see wikis mentioned again as anything other than 
>accessory/supporting to the actual plant DB.
>
>There's always a tradeoff between "freedom" and "structure" and wikis 
>are way too "free" for what I have understood we intend to offer.
>  
>
Yes. While working on the ontology, I realized that it can be very hard 
to convey some things in the detail one might like, often wanting to 
grab a qualifier to stick in there. So I think some form of free text 
entry (which might be more natural to people, then clicking through 100 
item form), but using a structured tagging using a flexible/growing 
ontology behind it which can be accessed by machine, would work 
reasonably. One issue to deal with in that case is how to handle data 
parsed from other sources, since they'd be coming in as text free 
triples, say from USDA Plants, etc.

A nice thing about a relatively small ontology composed of basically 
single or double words, is that translation would be quite quick. Each 
of the classes/individuals would best have a "term" property, the 
English version would often just split words with spaces for nicer text 
output, but someone could translate Construction, Building... into 'de', 
'es', etc, etc.

Here's the class list. Under these live the individuals. Deciding what's 
a class or individual is a bit difficult, but similar to OO programming: 
Classes can have allowed properties defined, whereas the individuals use 
those properties to define themselves.

Construction
        HumanConstruction
            Building
            Container
            Landscape
FoodState
GeographicArea
    Continent
        ContinentalRegion
            GeographicCountry
                GeographicState
                    GeographicCounty
                        PostalCodeZone
    Ecoregion
        Bioregion
    Latitudes
    TerrestrialBiomes
    USDAHardinessZone
Groups
    AnimalGroup
    InsectGroup
    PlantGroup
    SoilGroup
Habitat
    PlantLocations
Organism
    Animal
        Insect
        Mammal
        Reptile
    Bacteria
    Fungi
    Plant
    Protists
PlantPart
Process
    CookingProcess
    CultivationProcess
Product
    AesthicValue
    AgriculturalProduct
    BuildingMaterial
    ChemicalCompound
    Food
    Heat
    HouseholdProduct
    MedicinalProduct
    Nutriet
Property
    EnvironmentProperty
        Climate
        Humidity
        InsolationRate
        Pollution
        Precipitation
        SoilProperty
            SoilClayContent
            SoilConsistency
            SoilDepth
            SoilMoisture
            SoilNitrogen
            SoilOrganicMatter
            SoilPH
            SoilPorosity
            SoilSandContent
            SoilTexture
            SoilWaterLevel
        Tempurature
        Wind
    FoodProperty
        Flavor
    MedicalHazard
    MedicinalProperty
    PlantProperty
        CNRatio
        DayLength
        FirePotential
        FlowerColor
        FlowerConspicuous
        FlowerType
        FoliageColor
        FoliageTexture
        GrowthForm
        GrowthRate
        Habit
        Hardiness
        PlantDuration
        RootDepth
        ShapeAndOrientation
        Toxicity
        TreeCrownForm
        Wildlife
SoilTaxonomy
    Alfisols
    Andisols
    Aridisols
    Entisols
    Histosols
    Inceptisols
    Mollisols
    Oxisols
    Spodosols
    Ultisols
    Vertisols
State
    PlantStage
        FruitStage
        SeedStage
TemporalUnit
    Month
    Phenomilogical
    Season
    Year


Cheers,
Bear



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