While our discussions of issues have been very very helpful, they tend to stray from the original title of the issue. I think it would be helpful if we went at this with a bit more structure.   I think the progress we've made indicates that we might be able to come to a consensus about the concepts Organism, Occurrence, and MaterialSample, and in particular, how they should be encoded so that they are correctly aggregated and interpreted by end users.  So...

I've posted what we might use as a starter doc on the home page on our repository's wiki. But I think it would be far easier to comment and revise this in GoogleDocs.  So I'd like to propose that the group create a GoogleDocs folder with everyone having edit rights.  I'll invite you using the email address you've used to subscribe to the mailing list.  If you prefer to use another account for GoogleDocs, please let me know (by direct reply) and I'll add that account as well.  If editing takes off in the GoogleDoc, I'll delete that content from the wiki page as it gets out of date.

With best regards,

Stan