This message is related to a DwC clarification given by John Wieczorek in http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/2010-January/000219.html

in response to my post

http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/2009-December/000201.html

With regards to John's email, it seems clear to me that the subject of dwc:recordedBy should be Occurrences derived directly from Individuals, i.e. those which in the examples of my previous email which have gray arrows and would have been given "documentsDistribution" values of "True".

That is a more specific way of defining the applicability of recordedBy than the word "original" in the term definition.

I agree with what John said in his post that the dcterms:creator may not be the same as dwc:collector in many circumstances, but I think in his example of a specimen preparator, I would provide the name of the institution as dcterms:creator rather than the person who was the specimen preparator.  I suppose that could be a matter of preference - it's probably more important that the dwc:collector be properly recorded. 

I'm not sure what I think about John's statement that the dwc:recordedBy value for Occurrence resources with ”documentsDistribution" values of true should be applied to all of the resources derived from them.  The problem is that if the chain of derivation becomes too complicated, it becomes unclear what the "original" Occurrence is.  What about the situation in example 3:

http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~steve.baskauf/conceptual-scheme-botanical.gif

which is a relatively realistic circumstance in a botanical garden?  Would I give a dwc:recordedBy value to the DNA sample, and if I did would it be the name of the person who collected the seed, the person who planted the seed in the garden, or the person who collected the DNA sample from the living specimen?  It seems to me that it would be better to recommend that a value for dwc:recordedBy be given for all Occurrences that would have a "documentsDistribution" value of true, but to make its assignment optional for any resource where "documentsDistribution"=false.  If users want to know who collected the "original" Occurrence resource, let them trace the origin of the Occurrence resource back to the first resource that was derived from the Individual (how to do that is another can of worms that I will not open here, although I do have an answer to that question). 

Steve Baskauf

Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

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