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 https://tun.fi/. For example the identifier for Odonata (taxon) is https://tun.fi/MX.1. There are however several other namespaces in use, for example https://id.luomus.fi/ for collection specimens of the Finnish Natural History Museum and https://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.1the 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 https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# rdfs https://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema# xsd https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema# xml https://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace# owl https://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl# vcard https://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns# dc https://purl.org/dc/terms/ dcmitype https://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/ dwc https://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/ dwctype https://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwctype/ dwciri https://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/iri/ so https://schema.org/ cc https://creativecommons.org/ skos https://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core# herbo https://id.herb.oulu.fi/ luomus https://id.luomus.fi/ utu https://mus.utu.fi/ zmuo https://id.zmuo.oulu.fi/ gbif-dataset https://www.gbif.org/dataset/ rdfschema https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-rdf-schema-20140225/ geo https://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"

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

Most resources of api.laji.fi are defined in the default namespace https://tun.fi/, and the QName prefix is an empty string "". For example if the URI-identifier is https://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 https://schema.laji.fi.

(This section must be expanded)