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

[Bob Morris]

When you guys finally agree (or not) here are some questions as a
developer that I would ask you each. They are  not that different from
the issue I raised timidly about tying the semantics of "Individual"
to  distinguishing the "origin" of an aggregation. As always, pardon
any misuse of biological terms.

1. Neglecting-if one can--issues about colonial organisms--is a lichen
one individual or two?
2. In a way consistent with your answer to 1,  counting the human
obligate symbionts such as gut bacteria, is a human one individual or
many?
3. If you feel no compulsion to be consistent in answering 1 and 2,
will the addition of class Individual to DwC require further
properties to determine which of your inconsistent uses is in play, in
order that semantic integration about data on Individuals not become
logically inconsistent?
4. In the case of lichens or other(???) "compound" organisms whose
taxon name is conventionally given by the name of the fungal
component, are new DwC terms needed to distinguish whether an
Individual of that name is a lichen or a fungus?

(As far as I can tell from a bit of browsing on the web, the current
answer to the conundrum of 4 seems to be that the distinction is made
mainly in the dataset metadata, declaring in some way that the dataset
is of fungi or is of lichens. This doesn't seem very satisfactory in a
world where aggregators may isolate data from the datasets. It
probably imposes higher-than-record-level provenance requirements on
the integration.)

Bob Morris

-- 
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)