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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] RDF and Wikis

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  • From: Bear Kaufmann <bear@ursine-design.com>
  • To: john@eco-living.net, pcplantdb <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] RDF and Wikis
  • Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:54:11 -0800

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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