SMWCon Spring 2014/Expressing complex data in SMW: Lessons learned from building a botanical knowledge portal

Agriculture and AgriFood Canada (AAFC) is building an SMW-based botanical knowledge portal that will serve as a digital flora of the plants of Canada, and also as a platform for integrating and querying over other sources of botanical knowledge (specimens, DNA sequences, annotations, etc.). The complex, nested, and occasionally ambiguous structure of our data has presented a number of challenges. This talk will describe some of these challenges, and some of the successes and failures we've had in addressing them. We will also describe our plans for future development, and seek feedback from the SMW community on some of the design decisions we currently face.