[uf-discuss] species microformats & OpenSearch

[Benjamin West]

> .could ever contribute to the semantic web in a meaningful way & will stand
> the test of taxonomic revisions
I agree with this. It's unclear to me how the current proposal even
relates to the research gathered, and what use cases it might support.
Typically, microformat proposals are heavily influenced by the
analysis of examples collected.  I've tried doing this work at
<http://microformats.org/wiki/species-examples-regrouped>.

Most of the useful examples look similar to one of the sites you mentioned:
<a
  href="/data/spiders/14441"
  onMouseOver="window.status='';return true"
  title='Click for species description'>
     <i>Aculepeira carbonarioides</i>
     (Keyserling, 1892)
</a>

Looks to me like most mentions of species don't contain much
information about them, but rather link to to another page that does.
To me this resembles tagging, where species mentioned is the tag, and
the endpoint of the url is the resource representative of the tag.

Perhaps with further analysis, we can modify hReview or xFolk to be
useful for species, in order to model what is actually happening in
the market.

Can you:
* elaborate on the kinds of use cases you would expect a species
microformat to support
* confirm whether or not the above model is the most common way of
publishing species mentions
* collect intances of the authoritative resources and their markup of
the species
   * what is the most commonly published information (on the authoritative end)
   * how is it represented (on the authoritative end)

Ben


On 12/5/06, Shorthouse, David <dps1 at ualberta.ca> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I am a relative newcomer to microformats and come with a biological sciences
> background so am most interested in the "species" microformat group of
> discussions (http://microformats.org/wiki/species).
>
> Rod Page and I with contributions from Charles Roper have been having an
> interesting discussion about OpenSearch on his iSpecies
> (http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies/) blog
> (http://ispecies.blogspot.com/) as it relates to The Nearctic Spider
> Database's use of some software called Zoom Search. Of particular concern to
> me is:
>
> 1) using correct & appropriate nomenclature and,
> 2) providing a means to aggregate the sorts of species pages produced as
> exemplified by The Nearctic Spider Database
> (http://canadianarachnology.dyndns.org/data/canada_spiders/).
>
> To that end, I now make use of uBio LSIDs & marked-up species pages with:
>
> <h1><span class="species urn:lsid:ubio.org:namebank:2029133">Theridion
> agrifoliae</span> Levi, 1957</h1>
>
> .in the hopes that uBio's and other LSIDs will eventually contribute to the
> semantic web in a taxonomically intelligent way. This in my opinion is the
> way to go with microformats. I simply cannot comprehend how something like:
>
> <h1><span class="species">Theridion agrifoliae</span> Levi, 1957</h1>
>
> .could ever contribute to the semantic web in a meaningful way & will stand
> the test of taxonomic revisions (i.e how do the current species microformats
> deal with synonyms, homonyms, and other recognized nomenclature?).
>
> Finally, what steps have been taken to aggregate or make use of species
> microformats and can OpenSearch play some sort of role here in taking the
> next step?
>
> David P. Shorthouse
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Department of Biological Sciences
> CW-403, Biological Sciences Centre
> University of Alberta
> Edmonton, AB   T6G 2E9
> Phone: 1-780-492-3080
> mailto:dps1 at ualberta.ca
> http://canadianarachnology.webhop.net
> http://arachnidforum.webhop.net
> ------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
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