Bob, It seems to me that the most semantically clear way to indicate in a machine-readable way that two herbarium sheets are duplicates would be to assert that they have the same dwc:individualID. individualID is defined as "An identifier for an individual or named group of individual organisms represented in the Occurrence" so asserting that two occurrences represent the same individual or named group of individual organisms pretty much exactly describes what duplicate specimens are. I use this same approach to indicate that http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/67307 is an image of an acorn from the same tree: http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/ind-baskauf/67304 as the bark image http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/67312 I won't say more here as I have written more extensively on this approach in /Biodiversity Informatics/ 7:17-44 (https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jbi/article/view/3664). You can also look at the RDF associated with those GUIDs to see what I mean. Solving this problem is also one of the reasons I have proposed adding the class Individual to DwC (i.e. so that the individuals that are the object of dwc:individualID can be rdfs:type'd using a well-known vocabulary and therefore be "understood" by linked data clients).
Steve
Bob Morris wrote:
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#associatedOccurrences carries this description:
associatedOccurrences Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/associatedOccurrences Class: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Occurrence Definition: A list (concatenated and separated) of identifiers of other Occurrence records and their associations to this Occurrence. Comment: Example: "sibling of FMNH:Mammal:1234; sibling of FMNH:Mammal:1235". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Occurrence Details: associatedOccurrences
My questions: a. Are the names of the associations, and/or the syntax of the value meant to be community defined? b. If no to a. , where are those definitions? If yes, Have any communities defined any names and syntax? I am especially interested in "duplicate of" in the case of herbarium sheets." c. (May share an answer with b.) Is there any use being made by anyone in which associatedOccurrences is designed to have machine-readable values. If yes, where?
Thanks Bob