[Taxacom] Metetadata for names of living things: 'species' microformat and schema.org

[Andy Mabbett]

Some of you may recall that I have written here previously about the
draft 'species' microformat, for marking up for the names of living
things in HTML documents, etc, which I authored
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Microformats/Species>
[1] (already used by the BBC, Wikipedia and others).

You may also be familiar with the metadata scheme used by Google, Bing
and Yahoo, <http://schema.org>

I now plan to complete development of the microformat; and to make it
available also as a schema.org extension. Clealrly, there should be a
1-1 relationship and common terms used. I have made a post to this
effect on the W3C's "public vocabuaries" list, which sees to aid
coordination between the development of microformats, schema.org and
RDfa.

There are two issues about which I'm currently undecided:

* Should there continue to be one top-level property, currently
"biota", or one for each kingdom ("plant", "animal", "fungus"
"bacterium", "virus" - note that these are not always clear-cut
distinctions: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incertae_sedis>;
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)>)

* Should the properties continue to use English names such as
"kingdom", "order", "family" etc,  or latin "regnum", "ordo",
"familia"?

Though I do tend strongly towards not changing things for the sake of
it, I'm open to cogent arguments for doing so.

Then there are some proposed areas which have not yet been developed,
or not deployed, such as hybrids and commercial cultivars, GUIDs,
authority, etc.

Does anyone have any views? Is there any similar work underway
elsewhere? Would anyone be interested in deploying such a scheme?


[1] See also earlier work at
<http://microformats.org/wiki/species-strawman-01>, although that page
is no longer maintained; and uses the top-level of "species", which
was deprecated in favour of "biota".

-- 
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk