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<p class="MsoNormal">I am pleased with the significant and thoughtful
discussion
that has taken place on the tdwg-content email list regarding the
relationships
among Occurrences, Individuals, and other entities that are a part of
the
community's thinking about biodiversity metadata and the way that those
metadata are structured.<span style=""> </span>It appears from
the discussion that there is widespread acceptance of the idea that
Individual
as a concept has a place in the structuring of biodiversity metadata
and that
there is some consensus of what "Individual" means (i.e. an entity
ranging from actual biological individuals to small coherent
populations that
can reliably be asserted to represent a single taxon).<span style=""> </span>Whether
that acceptance and consensus
constitutes a compelling need for adding two new terms (the class
dwc:Individual and dwc:individualRemarks)
to the Darwin Core standard or not is the point of a TAG "vote".<span
style=""> </span>Given the discussion that has occurred, it
seems to me that there are two reasons why there is an actual need for
those
terms.<span style=""> </span>One reason is that if members of
the Darwin Core constituency intend to structure their metadata in a
fully
normalized manner that includes grouping Occurrences by Individuals
(and it
appears that there are at least several who intend to do this), the
term
dwc:individualRemarks is needed to provide a means indicate the nature
of the
individual (i.e. is it a biological individual, clonal individuals, a
small
population, etc.?) and the class dwc:Individual is needed as the
category within
which to put individualRemarks so as to indicate that individualRemarks
is a
property of Individuals.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>The
second reason for explicitly recognizing
Individual as a class is that it would place a term representing the
concept of
"Individual" within a "well-known vocabulary".<span style=""> </span>I
feel that would be critical for
facilitating the ultimate development of a recommendation for the
representation of Darwin Core as RDF.<span style=""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>At this point, it is not clear to me
that there are any other
existing DwC terms that should be moved to a new Individual class.<span
style=""> </span>Originally, I suggested that individualCount
should be placed in that class, but I no longer think so.<span style="">
</span>Counting the number of individuals is really
something that happens when an Occurrence takes place and a small
cohesive group
of a single taxon (e.g. wolf pack or plant population) could have an
individualCount that changes over time.<span style="">
</span>As was discussed earlier in on the email list, the xxxxxxID
terms
probably really belong in the Record-level terms category rather than
being
listed within particular classes.<span style=""> </span>So I
don't believe that dwc:individualID should be in the proposed class
either.<span style=""> </span>As I detailed in my Biodiversity
Informatics paper, an Individual is really an entity that serves
primarily as a
node that allows the grouping of other resources (namely Occurrences
and
Identifications).<span style=""> </span>As such, it really has
few (or no) properties that can be known outside of Occurrences.<span
style=""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thus I would like to "call the question" on the
issue of the proposal.<span style=""> </span>I would suggest
that the issue of adding the class dwc:Individual and the term
dwc:individualRemarks within it be addressed in a single vote, since
there
little point in having one term without the other.<span style="">
</span>I would also hope that those on the TAG who choose to vote would
review
the list discussion carefully first.<span style="">
</span>Given that the question of "what exactly is an Individual?" came
up a
few times after that question was clearly answered in the thread is an
indication that some people entered the thread later on without the
benefit of having
read some of the earlier posts.<br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Steve<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu">http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu</a>
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