Pollination Extension Concept List

This document lists the proposed concepts of a Pollination Extension for the existng InteractionExtension when the RelationshipType? is either VisitedFlowerOf? or HadFlowerVisitedBy?. This extension is being proposed as a means of recording additional data that can be relevant for pollination studies.

Status:

• First version (0.1) of the XML schema schema finished. Ready for testing.

Submitted by: Tereza Giannini, Renato De Giovanni, Etienne Cartolano, Antonio Saraiva and Pedro Pizzigatti.

Submitted: 25 June 2007

Development of this extension was supported in part by the Pollinators Thematic Network of the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) and by the Pollination Information Management System of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Comments & suggestions:

I strongly recommend not continuing to extended DwC? in this manner. Especially if it involves linking object together. It will only store up problems for the future. An RDF based approach similar to that used in the TAG.LSIDVocs would be more appropriate.

-- RogerHyam - 2007-09-06

comments:

As I said in my other comment on the InteractionExtension page, extending DarwinCore? was the simplest and most effective way to move forward in the projects that were interested in exchanging interaction/pollination data. The proposed approach is not intended to "store up problems for the future" for reasons already explained. Since DarwinCore? itself, ABCD, and most of the other TDWG activities involve non-RDF representations that are linking objects in one way or another, I suppose that your comments are not specific to these DarwinCore? extensions, so maybe this page is not the best place for the discussion. I'm one of the supporters of the TDWG ontology (and one of the first to suggest its creation) but it is still hard to sell the idea to other people who want to know: "How stable is the TDWG Ontology now? Is there enough agreement about its current version? How many providers are using it? When it is expected to be widely adopted? How can people participate in the discussions, decision and editing of the TDWG ontology?". I'll be happy to recommend and to migrate to the TDWG ontology at the right time, but I cannot recommend it if this is not yet compatible with other projects' deadlines. Fortunately, the infrastructure that we're all building provides ways to easily converge and migrate to a different data exchange standard when necessary.

-- RenatoDeGiovanni - 2007-09-07