[tdwg-content] taxonomy != identification

Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu
Thu Nov 4 15:43:14 CET 2010


Dusty,
Nice thought-provoking examples.  I think that it is safe to say that 
not everyone is going to want to use this broadly-defined concept of 
Individual.  But it will be there for people who want (or in my case 
need) to use it.  Those who want to use in in complex ways will have to 
bear the burden of figuring out how.  A few comments inline:

Dusty wrote:
> ...
>
>
>     > Composite specimens:
>     http://arctos.database.museum/guid/UAM:Herb:12718
>
>     This one could be represented as "Bupleurum" for the Individual
>     instance
>     representing the sheet, but then I would be inclined to establish two
>     "child" individuals (semantically related to the "parent" sheet),
>     one each
>     identified to the two different taxa.
>
>
> So I picked an easy example. Here's a slightly harder one: 
> http://arctos.database.museum/guid/MVZ:Egg:2355.
How about something like this?  Assign an Individual ID to the bird that 
build the nest which would be an Occurrence (documentary evidence of the 
bird that built it).  Assign an Individual ID to the brood-parasitic 
bird that laid the egg in the nest which would also be an Occurrence.  
Use the DwC Resource Relationship terms 
(http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#ResourceRelationship) to define 
the parasitism relationship between the two Occurrences.  This would be 
a good opportunity for John to demonstrate how one does this - I've 
never been clear exactly how it is supposed to work.
>
>     ...
>
>     > Things that aren't taxonomy at all:
>     http://arctos.database.museum/guid/UAM:ES:3405
>
>     Outside the scope of DwC?
>
>
> Maybe so, but there it is: 
> http://data.gbif.org/occurrences/242032297/. Excluding that would, I 
> think, force you to exclude things like 
> http://arctos.database.museum/guid/UAM:ES:3359 as well - it's all from 
> the same administrative unit. I don't have or want any control over 
> what Curators enter - any scope-limiting filter will have to happen 
> elsewhere.
People are always going to misapply terms.  I think sending records of 
rocks and minerals to GBIF as occurrences is an error (out of scope).  
So I don't feel any need to explain how to handle something like that. 
>
> The point is simply that these are real data. We won't change them to 
> some approximation of themselves or stuff them into a remarks field 
> somewhere. They'll get more complicated before we're done. Anything 
> that's to be useful to us must acknowledge the realities of 
> collections data.
>
True enough.  Thanks for the challenge!

Steve

-- 
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

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