Last month, I (Jim Balhoff) and Hilmar Lapp attended the Biodiversity Information Standards meeting (TDWG 2011), in New Orleans. As a representative of both Phenoscape and the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology project, I presented a poster, with co-authors Matt Yoder and Andy Deans, detailing an OWL model showing the explicit semantics of linking an Entity–Quality (EQ) phenotype to evolutionary character matrix data and taxonomic specimens. While EQ can be thought of as simple ontological tags on descriptive data, modeling phenotypes within a more explicit logical framework allows us to make use of more powerful automated reasoning. It also provides a consistent interpretation for EQs across projects annotating phenotypes (for example, Phenoscape and HAO). 
Of particular relevance to our poster was another presented by Cam Webb. Cam has created an OWL-compatible version of Darwin Core which can be used to describe specimen metadata in RDF. We made similar use of Darwin Core in our poster, but we are looking into adopting Cam’s Darwin-SW for this part of the model.
Overall there was a lot of interest in semantic technologies at TDWG, ranging from the initial meeting of an RDF/OWL working group to other projects that are not using semantic technologies but seem well suited for RDF.
Phenoscape 