For the past ten years, TDWG has envisioned a system that would facilitate automated machine processing to enable aggregation of data about similar types of resources, linking of differing types of resources, and reasoning of entailed data that is not explicitly stated by providers. Despite the attractiveness of this vision, progress towards achieving it has been very slow. This presentation will take a very broad view of what we can expect to achieve through machine processing, the challenges TDWG has faced and will face in moving toward a system that enables machine processing, and how the goal of enabling machine processing must influence the vocabulary development process. The presentation will lay out the issues in terms of a graph model, which is central to understanding the issues surrounding machine processing, and on which standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) are based. However, the presentation will not dwell on the details of RDF.
