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bioGUID |
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Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:38:45 +0100 |
I've put together a web site called http://bioguid.info which, rather
grandly, is an attempt to bootstrap the biodiversity Semantic Web by
providing resolvable URIs for biological objects, such as publications,
taxonomic names, nucleotide sequences, and specimens.
These URIs (or "GUIDs") can be resolved by a web browser to display
HTML, but under the hood are resolved to RDF (which you can see by
viewing the source of the web page you get for a URI).
The web interface is really window dressing, I just wanted a way to
display RDF that wouldn't frighten people (me included). For some URIs
all I do is grab XML and reformat it (e.g., DOIs). For GenBank records,
all manner of agony is involved in trying to extract specimen and
publication links.
A good place to get a sense of what bioguid.info is about is to start
with this Pubmed record: http://bioguid.info/pmid:17079492. From this,
you can get a list of sequences. If you click on one of those, you'll
see a link to a specimen, which you can then look at. For some
specimens there are maps, you'll need Firefox 1.5, Camino, Webkkit, or
a browser with a SVG plugin for the full effect (e.g.,
http://bioguid.info/FMNH:Mammals:175377).
What I'm trying to do generate enough RDF that can be linked together
to start building applications that can start with a publication, an
from that navigate through sequences, specimens, and evolutionary trees
(or do the reverse, given a locality recover sequences and
phylogenies).
It's a toy, but I'd welcome any comments. There's some related
commentary on http://www.nodalpoint.org/2007/03/21/bioguid_info
Regards
Rod
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Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
email: address@hidden
web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
iChat: aim://rodpage1962
reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic
Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org
Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/
Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org
Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
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