Allow looking up URIs of TDWG ontologies?

[frmichel]

Although the TDWG ontologies have not made it to become standards, some are in use out there, possibly because, from a pragmatic point of view, they address some vocabulary needs that are not well covered by DwC RDF.

Unfortunately, none of the URIs defined within TDWG ontologies can be looked-up. For instance, looking up http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonName#TaxonName returns an 404 error. Conversely, Darwin Core terms can be looked up, for instance an HTTP GET to http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/scientificName redirects to https://tdwg.github.io/dwc/terms/index.htm#scientificName, i.e. an HTML document describing the term.

So my question is simple: why not do the same with the (non-deprecated) TDWG ontologies? It would pretty easy to set up rewriting rules on the TDWG's web server to redirect e.g. http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonConcept to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tdwg/ontology/master/ontology/voc/TaxonConcept.rdf.

Ideally, of course, implementing content negotiation would help serve documents that are appropriate for the client: an HTML page for a web browser, an RDF content in whatever RDF syntax for a linked-data based application.

Besides, although work is going on with TCS2, I'm not sure how long it will take until actual ontologies stem from that. So in the meantime, having dereferenceable URIs for TDWG ontologies would help Linked Data publishers to at least rely on shared vocabulary terms, even it those term will evolve in the future.

What do you think?

[rdmpage]

+1 These vocabularies are in use by several nomenclature such as IPNI, IndexFungorum, and ION, between them serving millions of RDF documents that include these URIs. Would be nice if they were dereferencable.

[baskaufs]

I'm currently working on making everything in the rs.tdwg.org subdomain dereference via content negotiation. So I can add this to the list.

[frmichel]

Cool! Thx Steven, keep me updated ;)