info.laji.fi

Knowledge base of the FinBIF

Laji.fi

Semantic Web

Semantic web

Persistent globally unique identifiers

FinBIF uses a persistent HTTP URI-identifier for all objects, as recommended by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium): Best Practices for Publishing Linked Data. You can also read about Linked Open Data.

Occurrences, taxa, collection metadata, information systems etc are given a HTTP URI-identifier that is not supposed to change. The address provides information about the object in human and machine readable formats (Accept header aware).

Most objects have been defined in FinBIF’s own default namespace http://tun.fi/. For example the identifier for Odonata (taxon) is http://tun.fi/MX.1. There are however several other namespaces in use, for example http://id.luomus.fi/ for collection specimens of the Finnish Natural History Museum and http://id.zmuo.oulu.fi/ for Univerity of Oulu.

Using full URI-identifiers can be challenging in REST-API, so instead of a full URI-identifier it is possible to use a shorter QName. For example instead of :
https://api.laji.fi/collections/http%3A%2F%2Ftun.fi%2FHR.1
the request can be made more reliably using a short QName:
https://api.laji.fi/collections/HR.1

The following is a list of namespaces and their Qname prefixes known by FinBIF:

  
  rdf          http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
  rdfs         http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#
  xsd          http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#
  xml          http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace#
  owl          http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#
  vcard        http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#
  dc           http://purl.org/dc/terms/
  dcmitype     http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/
  dwc          http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/
  dwctype      http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwctype/
  dwciri       http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/iri/
  so           http://schema.org/
  cc           https://creativecommons.org/
  skos         http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#
  herbo        http://id.herb.oulu.fi/
  luomus       http://id.luomus.fi/
  utu          http://mus.utu.fi/
  zmuo         http://id.zmuo.oulu.fi/
  gbif-dataset https://www.gbif.org/dataset/
  rdfschema    http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-rdf-schema-20140225/
  geo          http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"

As a further example, if the URI-identifier is http://mus.utu.fi/TBR.119974 then the Qname is “utu:TBR.119974” and the property dwc:vernacularName is short for http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/vernacularName.

Most resources of api.laji.fi are defined in the default namespace http://tun.fi/, and the QName prefix is an empty string “”. For example if the URI-identifier is http://tun.fi/MX.1 then the QName is “MX.1”.

The default namespace tun.fi has been divided into internal namespaces (for example “MX” for taxa, “HR” for collection metadata, etc). This information should not be used to guide any application logic. The identifiers should not be assumed to contain any information.

Glossary

In ontologies there is a vocabulary that defines a schema for resources. Our schema is documented in address http://schema.laji.fi.

(This section must be expanded)

Scroll to top