Tagging Content in HTML with DWC Terms

Tagging Content in HTML with DWC Terms

Example 1: Name without context
Example 2: Name with simple context
Example 3 Observation with Name and Location

RDFa provides a mechanism for expressing semantic markup within HTML documents using RDF constructs.

Resources:

An RDFa parser is available to convert RDFa to RDF. Note that this parser seems to drop the rdf typeof property.

A simple standalone RDFa to RDF converter in python.

The W3C RDF validator provides a convenient tool for quickly visualizing an RDF structure.

Example 1: Name without context

Indicating that a string within a document is semantically equivalent to a scientific name as defined in the Darwin Core.

There is no additional information about the scientific name, only an indication that the character string represents a scientific name, and so parsers that are able to interpret RDFa are able to identify that value in the document, though no additional context is explicitly stated.

Source	RDF	RDF Visualized

HTML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
      xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/">
<head >
<title>Scientific Name in RDFa</title>
  <meta about='taxonname_1.html' property='dc:creator' content="Dave Vieglais"/>
  <meta about='taxonname_1.html' property='dc:date' content="2008-11-14T09:52:00+00:00" />
  <meta about='taxonname_1.html' property='dc:description' content="Demonstrates how to 
    tag a scientific name with RDFa markup so that a parser can recognize that a string
    value represents a scientific name." />
</head>
<body>
  <p>This example shows how to tag a scientific name with RDFa markup so that a 
  parser can recognize that the string 
<span property='dwc:scientificName' style='font-style: italic;'>Bufo marinus</span> 
as a scientific name, and the string &quot;<span property='dwc:family'>Bufonidae</span>
is a family name, but there is no statement that the B. marinus is a 
member of the family Bufonidae.</p>
</body>
</html>

Example 2: Name with simple context

This example wraps the scientific name and family within a named node, implying that the two are properties about the node rather than the whole document. This in turn infers that the scientific name is a member of the family, although this information is only contained in the human readable descriptions of the Darwin Core terms and can not be directly inferred from the RDF.

Source	RDF	RDF Visualized

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
      xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/">
<head >
<title>Scientific Name in RDFa</title>
  <meta about='taxonname_2.html' property='dc:creator' content="Dave Vieglais"/>
  <meta about='taxonname_2.html' property='dc:date' content="2008-11-14T09:52:00+00:00" />
  <meta about='taxonname_2.html' property='dc:description' content="Demonstrates how to 
    tag a scientific name with RDFa markup so that a parser can recognize that a string
    value represents a scientific name." />
</head>
<body>
  <p>This example shows how to tag a scientific name with RDFa markup so that a 
  parser can recognize that the string
<span about='#name1' typeof='dwct:Record'>
<span property='dwc:scientificName' style='font-style: italic;'>Bufo marinus</span> 
as a scientific name, and the string &quot;<span property='dwc:family'>Bufonidae</span>
is a family name</span>, and since both terms form part of a Darwin Core record,
infers that Bufonidae is the family name for &quot;#name1&quote; and Bufo marinus
is the scientific name.</p>
</body>
</html>

Example 3 Observation with Name and Location

Describes an observation in a HTML document using RDFa notation. This minimal example expresses the location two ways- using the Darwin Core DecimalLatitude and DecimalLongitude terms and the GeoRSS point.

Source	RDF	RDF Visualized

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
      xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/"
      xmlns:dwct="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwctype/"
      xmlns:georss='http://www.georss.org/georss#'>
<head >
<title>Scientific Name in RDFa</title>
  <meta about='sciname_location.html' property='dc:creator' content="Dave Vieglais"/>
  <meta about='sciname_location.html' property='dc:date' content="2008-11-14T09:52:00+00:00" />
  <meta about='sciname_location.html' property='dc:description' content="Demonstrates how to
    create the equivalent of a simple observation record within a HTML document that can be
    converted to an RDF document." />
</head>
<body>
  <p>This example document contains a record with of an observation tagged with an lsid of xxx
  <span about="lsid:blah.blah" typeof="oboe:Observation">
  that includes the scientific name 
  <span property='dwc:scientificName' style='font-style: italic;'>Bufo marinus</span>,
  <span about='lsid:blah.blah' typeof="dc:Location" > 
    <span property='dwc:geodeticDatum' content='epsg:4326' />
  a geographic location of
    <span about='lsid:blah.blah' property='georss:point' content='-25.273262 152.725067' />
  longitude <span property='dwc:decimalLongitude'>152.725067</span> east, 
  latitude <span property='dwc:decimalLatitude'>-25.273262</span>, 
  </span> 
  and a time of
  <span about='lsid:blah.blah' property='dwc:eventDate' content="2008-11-10T23:32:00+00:00">
  9:32 in the morning of the 12th of November.</span>
  </span>
</p>
</body>
</html>

Comment by nickdos@gmail.com, Nov 28, 2010

Example 3 inline code is not the same as the "Source" version - namespace oboe declaration is missing in html tag.

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