What is your position about:
- "All the whales that were within 10 km of Maui between 2010-06-01 and 2010-08-31." - "All the whales that will have been within 10 km of Maui between 2012-06-01 and 2012-08-30." - "All the whales that that will have been within 10 km of Maui in the next 91 days"
Also for each of the above, what about - "A whale that..." and
Also per Hillmar, for each of the 6 cases, consider the 6 cases that negate the verbs, e.g. "All the whales that were not within..."
When you are done with that exercise, what about the difference between "A whale" and "The whale"?
{FWIW, for finite sets, the difference between intensional and extensional definition is largely one of practicality based on the set size. That's not the case for infinite sets, for which extensional definitions are impossible. This is one reason I wouldn't be enamored of your criterion. I don't think it in fact includes some actual whales but excludes others.}
Bob
On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 2:26 AM, Richard Pyle deepreef@bishopmuseum.org wrote:
But Hilmar recommended a companion list of things not in the class. What
are
some of those?
Right -- sorry!
Well, plenty of things are not in the class (Localities, dates, etc., etc.). But more specifically, I would say that any circumscription of organisms that is based on an intensional definition (sensu Régine) would be excluded (and would instead be covered by the "Taxon" class). That is, if a set of organisms is defined by properties, rather than by specific members, it would be excluded from this class. Also excluded from this class would be an organism or set of organisms bounded by time or space. What I mean by this is that the temporal scope of an organism instance begins when the organism(s) is/are born, and ends when the organism(s) disintegrates (I didn't want to say "die", because a dead specimen is still an organism, in my option -- but a disintegrated specimen is not). Also, one cannot define an instance of organism dynamically via space and time, such as "all whales off Maui during the winter months", as the members would change year after year.
This reasoning would tend to exclude "population" from this class; but if population also is excluded from Taxon, then I don't know how one would represent an instance of a population via DwC. Surely there is an informatics need to track/monitor/analyze sets of organisms defined by "population". But how would one represent such a unit in DwC? If not as a Taxon, and not as an Organism, then how would one instantiate a "population" and assign properties to it? Another new class, perhaps? That would make me squeamish.
Incidentally, I have been using the term "Organism" consistently to refer to this class; but as I said previously, I am reasonably open-minded to what the term should be (as long as it doesn't include the word "taxon", and only if there is broad community consensus if it includes the words "Instance" or "Individual").
Aloha, Rich
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