The TreeBASE implementation of PhyloWS searching doesn't match the "standard" and is internally inconsistent. According to https://www.nescent.org/wg_evoinfo/PhyloWS/REST the URL to search for a taxon is of the form http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/find/taxon?query= (note /find/taxon) whereas the TreeBASE API (https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/treebase/index.php?title=API#Searching) uses http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/taxon/find?query= (note taxon/find, the reverse order to the TreeBASE URL).
The RSS feed returned by a TreeBASE search uses the correct PhyloWS URI for <channel rdf:about>, not the actual URL used to perform the search. This means we can't, for example, query a triple store for a taxon using the same URI as we'd use to undertake a search.
The solutiion I'd prefer is to make the TreeBASE search API follow PhyloWS, which would also make the search URI and results URI the same.