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Using Darwin-SW to Answer Questions About Biodiversity Resources
Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-11-01 09:11 AM – 09:20 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-07
Abstract
Darwin-SW (DSW) is a vocabulary which extends the TDWG Darwin Core (DwC) vocabulary to express relationships among the DwC classes and new classes defined within DSW (http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/). It uses Web Ontology Language (OWL) to define object properties that link the classes in a manner consistent with historical models of the biodiversity informatics realm while incorporating new ideas for linking types of resources originating outside of the museum community such as living organisms, images, and sequences. The structure of DSW allows for the creation of highly normalized RDF graphs representing many types of interrelated resources originating from diverse sources. These graphs can be queried using SPARQL, a standard semantic tool, to answer questions that cannot be easily addressed by examining data in the form of flat database tables. We show how SPARQL queries on actual DSW-based RDF from the wild can address competency questions such as "find images of living individuals of species X where those individuals are also documented by specimens".