John et al.,
I have been pondering the difference of the use of the terms
dwc:recordedBy and dcterms:creator (http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator).
dcterms:creator is defined as:
"An entity primarily responsible for making the resource."
dwc:recordedBy is defined as:
A list (concatenated and separated) of names of people, groups, or
organizations responsible for recording the original Occurrence. The
primary collector or observer, especially one who applies a personal
identifier (recordNumber), should be listed first.
Except for the one word "original" in dwc:recordedBy, I would believe
that these two terms would mean the same thing in the case of Occurrence
resources. In some cases, such as the collection of a physical specimen
or photographing a live organism, I think that they are the same thing.
The entity that creates the resource (specimen or image) is the same
entity that has recorded the Occurrence. However, in the situation
where a specimen is imaged, the resulting image resource would have a
dcterms:creator that was the person or institution that did the specimen
imaging, while according to the way that I read the definition,
dwc:recordedBy for the specimen image would have a value that specified
the collector of the specimen (not the photographer).
If I am correct in this interpretation, this distinction would be useful
in the case of images because it would allow for a simple mechanism to
distinguish between images that directly record the appearance of
individual organisms and images that are simply digital representations
of some other thing that records the appearance of an individual
organism, i.e. if dcterms:creator= =dwc:recordedBy then the resource was
collected directly from an organsim and if dcterms:creator
!=dwc:recordedBy then the resource might represent some other resource
that was collected directly from an organism.
I am not sure how this would apply in situations other than images. For
example, if a spider were collected and assigned a persistent
identifier, then later for a character documentation project the body
parts were separated and considered separate specimens with their own
identifiers, would the metadata for a leg specimen resource have
dcterms:creator as the person who made the leg prep and dwc:recordedBy
be the person who collected the spider?
Basically, I would like to know the intention of the use of the word
"original" in the definition of dwc:recordedBy.
Steve Baskauf
--
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
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
_______________________________________________
tdwg-content mailing list
tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org
http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content