TDWG Infrastructure Project (TIP)

Technical Architecture Group (TAG)Roger Hyam

TDWG Executive MeetingJune 1-2, 2006 - Madrid, Spain

TAG – Proposed Role

• Maintain an account of current situation.• Maintain a vision of how things could be.• Provided formal advice to the Executive

Committee on new subgroups and standards.

• Provided advice to TDWG members on how their work can integrate with others.

(all from a purely technical perspective)

Paradigm

• Starting assumption is that standards are about sharing data.

• Sharing data also implies sharing data through time.

Archive

What is Shared?

• Sharing raw literals isn’t much use.

• They need to be gathered together into ‘semantic’ units or objects.

TaxonName:1234Bellis perennis

perennis

Bellis

1234

Semantics of Objects

• Objects need to be based on some shared semantics.

• There needs to be somewhere to look up what they mean – an ontology.

TaxonName:Bellis perennis

Ontology

TaxonName?

Identity of Objects

• How do I refer to this object?

• Who should I credit?

• Who should I send corrections to?

• Is it the same record as I already have or is it a new one?

• What is the official version of this data - has some one altered it before I received it?

TAG-1 Meeting

• There was consensus on-– Architecture is concerned with shared data– Biodiversity data will be modeled as a graph

of identifiable objects– The semantics of these objects will be

encoded in a series of shared ontologies– Ontologies will be related to each other on the

basis of a shared Base and Core ontologies as a minimum

• Discussion continues on how this is done

Implications

• We need a ontology to define and relate the objects we exchange.

• Ontology governance/management is paramount.

• We need a system of GUIDs to identify the objects.

• We need a roadmap for the protocols to exchange these objects.

Structure of the OntologyBase Ontology

Core Ontology

Domain Ontology

Application Ontologies

BaseThing BaseActor

CoreTaxonName CoreInstitution

TaxonName

NomencalturalType

NomeclaturalNote

Herbarium

ABCD DarwinCore ???

Ontology Governance

• Allow people to create Domain sub-ontologies easily – prevent alienation.

• Each ontology construct (concept) has a status.

• Status is increased by passing through explicit gates defined by actual usage.

Experimental Shared Recommend

Recommendations

• We need to develop a TDWG standard that specifies how we manage the TDWG ontology.

• We need a technology independent way of working with the ontology that can be understood and manipulated by biologists – some form of web based application.

Protocols

• Resolution – LSID, URL etc.

• Harvest – OAI, RSS, other?

• Search/Query – BioCASe, DiGIR, TAPIR, SPARQL, other?

Challenges

Protocol Number at end 2007

DiGIR 200+

BioCASe ~100

TAPIR 10 possibly 40+

SPARQL 30+

LSID 10?

Solutions

• Resolution and harvest protocols are relatively easy to plug into or wrap round existing service providers.

• Implementers of the most widely used protocols are ‘on board’.

• …We have a clear, agreed direction.