Draft White Paper on Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS). Contains survey of community, survey of current biodiversity KOS landscape, and recommendations to GBIF for KOS adoption.
KOS includes controlled vocabularies, thesauri, gazetteers, ontologies and other knowledge management resources.
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Aurona Gerber
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Thank you for this opportunity to comment.
I want to congratulate the team on a well written document. I enjoyed reading it. I hope some of my comments may be of use to you. I participate from the Information Systems / Computer Science side.
Regarding the 'Needs for KOS' I may just add that the fact that people still do not use OWL could probably be tied to the learning curve involved and not due to 'unpopularity' or 'not being of use'. To really develop a useful ontology in OWL, one needs to be quite versed in the logical foundations. Properly using OWL/ontology technologies could be very advantageous in this endeavour, and would probably open up opportunies not envisioned at the moment.
With regards to the OBO Foundry and associated GO ontology family, it might be useful to also note the approach and 'ontology architecture' adopted. Ontology integration is still an open research issue and if one develops 'ontologies' that overlap, it creates problems. This is adressed by the OBO Foundry / GO in a practical way by clearly separating domains and indicating the links. This article 'Toward a Global Biodiversity
Observing System' at http:/
Science.pdf seems to be hinting at this. Also see http:/
With regards to the topic of 'shared vocabularies', one might also look at SnoMed CT - http:/
It might be useful to consider some of the foundational ontologies, such as DOLCE http:/
Of course, other than NeOn (http:/
best regards
Aurona Gerber
Aurona Gerber 546 days ago