MRTG implementation bioimages

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→ MRTG Wiki Homepage
→ Current Schema Draft. This version is under internal review as part of the submission to TDWG.
→ Audubon Core Non normative document
→ MRTG Development History
→ MRTG Meeting Notes
→ MRTG Best Practices
→ XML Schema representation of Audubon Core
→ RDF representation of Audubon Core
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1 About Bioimages

The Bioimages website (http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu) provides information and images to the public for educational and non-commercial use. The site is focused primarily on plants of North America with most images from the southeastern U.S. There are also images of North American ecoregions and some animal images.

2 Bioimages site redesign

The Bioimages site is being redesigned to make it more easily used on portable devices and to implement HTTP URI globally unique identifiers for images and the individual plants that they illustrate. As a part of this process, RDF metadata files are created for each image and individual.

3 Use of MRTG terms

The properties of the resources described in the RDF metadata files primarily use predicates that are a part of the Darwin and Dublin Core standards. However, these vocabularies lack many important terms for describing the technical attributes of the images and intellectual property rights and terms of use for the images. Terms from the MRTG schema are used to describe these properties.

The image http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/27471 illustrates the flower of an Impatiens capensis plant. When a web browser requests the URI that identifies the image, a web page is returned which shows the image and metadata describing it. When a semantic client requests the URI, the RDF/XML file http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/27471.rdf is returned. Within that file, several sections describes properties of the image using MRTG properties.

In addition, other resources are defined within the RDF file as Service Access Points using the mrtg:hasServiceAccessPoint class as the type of the resource. Each of these Service Access Points provides information about variants of the image (i.e. different sizes) and how they can be obtained. The mrtg:accessURL term is very useful in this context because it provides a way to specify the URL from which the variant can be obtained without forcing the variant to be accessed directly from the URI which forms its identifier. Thus the access URL can be changed without changing the GUID for the variant itself.

4 Is this right???

Since the MRTG schema does not specify how its terms should be used in RDF, I have taken a lot of liberties in my use of them in that context. If you would like to discuss the use of MRTG terms in RDF or would like additional information about the Bioimages site, please contact steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu

Steve Baskauf 04:04, 5 October 2010 (CEST)