[tdwg-content] dwc:associatedOccurrences

John Wieczorek tuco at berkeley.edu
Tue Aug 24 15:24:19 CEST 2010


Note that associatedOccurrences is one of the several terms that are meant
to allow lists of relationships between resources to be captured in a single
field. Others include associatedMedia, associatedReferences,
associatedSequnces, and associatedTaxa. The main purposes of these fields is
to provide a mechanism to share relationship information in a flat
application profile such as the Simple Darwin Core (
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/simple/index.htm). If an application profile
isn't constrained by being flat, then there is a much more robust way to
capture relationships, using the ResourceRelationship class and it's
constituent terms (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#relindex).

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 6:39 PM, Bob Morris <morris.bob at gmail.com> wrote:

> Good idea, but it suffers from the same fate as might
> associatedOccurrences  (not previously mentioned because I was after
> some clarification in principle, with the herbarium duplicate sheets
> only one current case of interest): I need to follow whatever the
> community practice is of regarding a sheet as part of a duplicate set
> distributed by the original collector.  I'm told by the people at the
> Harvard University Herbaria that "duplicate" usually, but not always,
> means from the same organism and same collection event---occasionally
> people used to put several organisms on the same sheet, raising the
> possibility that they are not even the same taxon. Worse,  the
> different parts of the same organism might be catalogued as separate
> specimens. In this case, an assertion that they are from the same
> individual might be true and understandable, but the utility of that
> assertion depends on your purpose. Consider a use case in which one
> set of traditional duplicates all have a determination that is out of
> date, but another specimen---say your acorn collected later from the
> same tree---has a current determination.  For purposes of notifying
> duplicate holders that a new determination has been made to the
> original, the later acorn may not be interesting. This means that for
> this use, a distributed query of the form "find all records with the
> same dwc:individualID" is not as useful as "find all records with the
> same dwc:eventID".
>
> Also, as Mark writes, it doesn't address any other associatedOccurrences.
>
> More generally, we are working on annotations of data records.
> Probably what the real issue here is that associatedOccurrences is an
> assertion about organisms, and we are making assertions about
> occurrence data.
>
> On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Steve Baskauf
> <steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> > Bob,
> > It seems to me that the most semantically clear way to indicate in a
> > machine-readable way that two herbarium sheets are duplicates would be to
> > assert that they have the same dwc:individualID.  individualID is defined
> as
> > "An identifier for an individual or named group of individual organisms
> > represented in the Occurrence" so asserting that two occurrences
> represent
> > the same individual or named group of individual organisms pretty much
> > exactly describes what duplicate specimens are.  I use this same approach
> to
> > indicate that
> > http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/67307
> > is an image of an acorn from the same tree:
> > http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/ind-baskauf/67304
> > as the bark image
> > http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/67312
> > I won't say more here as I have written more extensively on this approach
> in
> > Biodiversity Informatics 7:17-44
> > (https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jbi/article/view/3664).  You can also
> > look at the RDF associated with those GUIDs to see what I mean.  Solving
> > this problem is also one of the reasons I have proposed adding the class
> > Individual to DwC (i.e. so that the individuals that are the object of
> > dwc:individualID can be rdfs:type'd using a well-known vocabulary and
> > therefore be "understood" by linked data clients).
> >
> > Steve
> >
> > Bob Morris wrote:
> >
> > http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#associatedOccurrences   carries
> > this description:
> >
> > associatedOccurrences
> > Identifier:   http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/associatedOccurrences
> > Class:        http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Occurrence
> > Definition:   A list (concatenated and separated) of identifiers of
> > other Occurrence records and their associations to this Occurrence.
> > Comment:      Example: "sibling of FMNH:Mammal:1234; sibling of
> > FMNH:Mammal:1235". For discussion see
> > http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Occurrence
> > Details:      associatedOccurrences
> >
> > My questions:
> > a.  Are the names of the associations, and/or the syntax of the value
> > meant to be community defined?
> > b. If no to a. , where are those definitions? If yes, Have any
> > communities defined any names and syntax? I am especially interested
> > in "duplicate of" in the case of herbarium sheets."
> > c. (May share an answer with b.) Is there any use being made by anyone
> > in which associatedOccurrences is designed to have machine-readable
> > values.  If yes, where?
> >
> > Thanks
> > Bob
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
> > Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
> >
> > postal mail address:
> > VU Station B 351634
> > Nashville, TN  37235-1634,  U.S.A.
> >
> > delivery address:
> > 2125 Stevenson Center
> > 1161 21st Ave., S.
> > Nashville, TN 37235
> >
> > office: 2128 Stevenson Center
> > phone: (615) 343-4582,  fax: (615) 343-6707
> > http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Robert A. Morris
> Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
> UMASS-Boston
> 100 Morrissey Blvd
> Boston, MA 02125-3390
> Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
> email: morris.bob at gmail.com
> web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
> web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
> http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
> phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
> _______________________________________________
> tdwg-content mailing list
> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/attachments/20100824/f98af52b/attachment.html 


More information about the tdwg-content mailing list