[tdwg-content] Why it matters what kind of things we include in the definition of Individual

[Richard Pyle]

Crap.  I accidentally sent that before I was tready to send it.  I'll
continue where I ended: 

> The risk that we make the definition of Individual so broad that it 
> can't perform any of the functions it was defined to serve.  

...or so narrow that it can only perform a fraction of what we'd like it to
serve.....

> We've already lost one of them (the ability to infer
> duplicates) when I agreed to the broader definition, but 
> that's the subject of another post.

Huh?  I don't understand how we've lost the ability to infer duplicates, and
what aspect of the broader definition caused us to lose it.

> I think that what I I have suggested above is very 
> unrestrictive.  We let evidence be the type of things that 
> they are (PreservedSpecimens, Individuals, StillImages, 
> SoundRecordings, DNA sequences, etc.).  We don't determine 
> their type by what we want to use them for.  That was the 
> mistake that I made in the Biodiversity Informatics paper.  
> If we follow this approach, then a StillImage can fill any 
> role that we want: evidence that an Occurrence happened, 
> information to support an Identification, a character for a 
> visual key, a logo, etc. We let it fulfill those roles by 
> giving it an identifier and connecting it to other resources 
> using appropriate terms (hasEvidence, derivedFrom, 
> mrtg:attributionLogoURL, etc.

I guess what I still don't quite understand is how we represent the
attributes of the "evidence" in DwC.

I'm out of time for now.  Will address the other emails later.

Aloha,
Rich