%META:TOPICINFO{author="EamonnOTuama" date="1184335124" format="1.1" reprev="1.4" version="1.4"}%

%META:TOPICPARENT{name="InstanceExamples"}%

_Salmo salar_ instance document is attached below ([[%ATTACHURL%/SalmoSalar.rdf][SalmoSalar.rdf]]). See also the one-page annotated document ([[%ATTACHURL%/spm-instance-explained.pdf][spm-instance-explained.pdf]]) which provides a quick overview of the model.

I have been studying Marcus's example of a SPM instance document here (http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/SPM/AbiesAlba) and to gain a better understanding began to mark up a piece of text on the distribution of _Salmo salar_ that I copied from FishBase (http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/speciesSummary.php?ID=236&genusname=Salmo&speciesname=salar). For this exercise, I'm ignoring the fact that the material comes from FishBase and just treating it as a piece of original writing.

_Distribution:_

_Atlantic Ocean: temperate and arctic zones in northern hemisphere (Ref. 51442). In western Atlantic Ocean distributed in coast drainages from northern Quebec in Canada to Connecticut in USA (Ref. 5723). In eastern Atlantic Ocean distributed in drainages from the Baltic states to Portugal (Ref. 51442). Landlocked stocks are present in Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway (Ref. 6439) and in North America (Ref. 1998)._

Note that there are four separate references in the paragraph, one of which is repeated. I've extracted the individual statements and tagged them as 'spmi:Distribution' and included a 'tcom:PublishedInCitation' tag for the relevant reference.

I've also included an 'spmi:Reproduction' tag.

My questions:

Is this the correct way to quote literature references in SPM?

Is there any way of applying multiple tags, e.g. to indicate that the statement on reproduction is also about behaviour (i.e. reproductive behaviour)? I thought we had come up with a way to that at the workshop.

Is the Species Profile Model InfoItems Ontology deliberately kept flat (i.e. non-hierarchical) for simplicity. This contrasts with our initial scoping efforts where 'TaxonBiology' was a general class that included other subclasses like TrophicStrategy, Dispersal, Migrations, Reproduction ...

This all seems to be getting a bit more complicated than I hoped ;-). I keep reverting to the simple use case of an agent like the EoL having a requirement to harvest species profiles from all kinds of sources on the internet in order to select and possibly edit for inclusion in their own species pages. And while FishBase and other major species banks can probably export XML which can be expressed in RDF that use the TDWG LSID vocabularies, the many smaller data suppliers will have to be encouraged to mark-up their data in an SPM comforming way. That means an easy to understand set of vocabularies and, ideally, easy-to-use tools to assist in the mark-up.

-- Main.EamonnOTuama - 14 Jun 2007

%META:FILEATTACHMENT{name="SalmoSalar.rdf" attachment="SalmoSalar.rdf" attr="" comment="distribution of Salmo salar - FishBase example marked up in SPM" date="1182263879" path="SalmoSalar.rdf" size="5902" stream="SalmoSalar.rdf" user="Main.EamonnOTuama" version="3"}%

%META:FILEATTACHMENT{name="spm-instance-explained.pdf" attachment="spm-instance-explained.pdf" attr="" comment="One-page annotated overview of the instance document" date="1184334671" path="spm-instance-explained.pdf" size="144507" stream="spm-instance-explained.pdf" user="Main.EamonnOTuama" version="1"}%