[tdwg-content] Expressing some relationships in DwC?

"Markus Döring (GBIF)" mdoering at gbif.org
Wed Oct 26 12:14:56 CEST 2011


Well sure, valid is overloaded just as accepted is which we nevertheless use for the "accepted" taxonomic relation.
Leaving aside what the actual term name is, validNameUsage, correctNameUsage, amendedNameUsage or sth else - it seems to fix the problem, doesn't it?

"DwCa 2.0" would be a drastic change which feels like reinventing the relational wheel. It might be better to go with sth existing in that case, e.g. Google Dataset Publishing Language: http://code.google.com/apis/publicdata/

Using the generic relationship extension is good, but also has serious drawbacks. Immediately these come to my mind:
 - it is much harder to publish and consume data in this format. Without publishing tools you will be lost.
 - the controlled vocabulary for the relationship type must be *very* controlled. Especially we need to avoid overloading which will easily happen very quickly, see valid or accepted.
- all linked resources must have unique ids across all classes, pretty much globally unique ids. Nice to have, but hard for publishers.

Markus


On 26.10.2011, at 00:58, Richard Pyle wrote:

> Hmmm.... watch out for that tricky word "valid".  It means different things
> to botanists & zoologists. The term "accepted" is generally seen as a more
> code-neutral term to mean "valid" (sensu zoology) or "correct"/"accepted"
> (sensu botany).  But if you mean "valid" in the botanical sense (="validly
> published", or "available" sensu zoology).  I'm not entirely sure which
> sense of "valid" is meant in this context.
> 
> 
> More fundamentally, however, I'd like to report that a number of folks at
> TDWG seemed to have converged on the same idea that, perhaps, we should be
> using resourceRelationship more frequently (perhaps a *LOT* more
> frequently).  A lot of these terms that effectively represent the functional
> equivalent to "foreign keys" might be better packaged in the more open-ended
> structure of resourceRelationship.  In fact, at one of the sessions at TDWG
> (I believe it was at the AudubonCore break-out session), we discussed the
> idea of DwCA "2.0", which would essentially define n-number of "Cores", and
> then package the relationships among them via a set of resourceRelationship
> records.  This idea emerged from a discussion about how people have been
> trying to "force" many-to-many sorts of data into the one-to-many DwCA
> format.  The beauty of using a more generic resourceRelationship set for
> this function is that it allows one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many
> relationships all in one structure.  It may seem klunky now, but if we used
> it as a general method to describe all relationships between instances of
> DwC "classes", it would become pretty straightforward, I think.
> 
> Something to think about, anyway...
> 
> Aloha,
> Rich
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-
>> bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Tony.Rees at csiro.au
>> Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 4:34 PM
>> To: mdoering at gbif.org
>> Cc: tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
>> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Expressing some relationships in DwC?
>> 
>> Hi Markus,
>> 
>> You wrote:
>> 
>>> I begin to wonder if a new term dwc:validNameUsageID would solve this
>>> issue gracefully and remove the need for a relationship extension.
>> 
>> Yes, I believe this would cover both the cases I need, I think, when
>> accompanied by nomenclatural status = misspelling / nomenclatural status =
>> nomen nudum... - comments, anyone?
>> 
>> Cheers - Tony
>> 
>> ________________________________________
>> From: "Markus Döring (GBIF)" [mdoering at gbif.org]
>> Sent: Wednesday, 26 October 2011 1:43 AM
>> To: Rees, Tony (CMAR, Hobart)
>> Cc: tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
>> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Expressing some relationships in DwC?
>> 
>> Hi Tony,
>> thanks for these practical questions. See inline for answers.
>> Markus
>> 
>>> I have a few nomenclatural relationships between name that I would like
> to
>> express using DwC, and would like to know the preferred way to do this if
>> any. The relationships are as follows:
>>> 
>>> (1) Point a nomen novum to the basionym it replaces. From reading there
>> was formerly a concept basionym/basionymID, apparently this is now
>> replaced with originalNameUsage/originalNameUsageID. So one quesiton is,
>> is this sufficient to infer this is a basionym, when accompanied by
>> noneclaturalStatus = 'nomen novum'?
>> yes, that is exactly right. As far as I understand the term basionym is
> more of
>> a botanical term and was not used as the final dwc term therefore.
>> 
>>> (2) Point an orthographic variant to the name which it is a variant of
>> (whether or not the latter is now the accepted name). In other words, if
>> name A is a variant of name B which is now a synonym of name C, I capture
>> the A=>C relationship with a synonym assertion, but I want a way to
>> capteure the A=>B relationship too.
>> This is only possible with an extension I am afraid. For example the
> generic
>> dwc relationship one:
>> http://rs.gbif.org/extension/dwc/resource_relation.xml
>> 
>>> (3) Point a nomen nudum to a validly published instance that comes later
>> (or do the same in reverse, i.e. this name was preceded by xxx as a nomen
>> nudum). Again, this should be independent of whether the validly published
>> name is an accepted name or now a synonym of something else.
>> same problem as above.
>> I begin to wonder if a new term dwc:validNameUsageID would solve this
>> issue gracefully and remove the need for a relationship extension.
>> 
>> 
>>> Advice appreciated,
>>> 
>>> Regards - Tony Rees
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
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