- I like how you have done the hasPart and isPartOf thing to aggregate the components - is this a standard way to do things? I hadn't seen it before
I don't know about "standard" but it is part of good practices. It links the different parts of the dataset together. Without something like that there is no
way to know that a particular resource like the #observation (when floating in the data cloud) is part of something else
I followed the documentation page in googlecode, but after your note I looked at the example and changed it to
This issue has gone back and forth a few times. I was originally thinking that having a TaxonConceptID would allow someone to tag their specimens
and observations to a easily accessible clear concept. If you look at the original description of Ochlerotatus triseriatus (Culex triseriatus) it is
a little over a paragraph and, as described, could be up to 10 different species of mosquito. I don't think most mosquitoes are identified with an particular formal taxonomic description in mind unless you consider one of the widely used keys a formal description. Also unless there is a global unique identifier for each of these descriptions it will be difficult to automatically determine if the literature reference is actually the same. In other words, as it currently is structured linking to a literature reference simply perpetuates the "are these the same or are these different?" confusion into the digital realm.
Think about it this way; of the millions" of observation records in GBIF, how many of the specimens were assigned names after identifier consulted a formal species description?
Some mosquito workers use their own unpublished keys, I use the latest Darsie. Doesn't this mean that we are not tagging specimens to the same species description? How will this limit the ways in which this data can be interpreted?
I suspect there will be similar problems with records of frogs and birds.
I feel I am in the middle of the road on this. There are a very large number of people who feel that the NCBI number is the species concept.
As diagrammed:
<Publication is Species Concept> <Pete> <BarCode is Species Concept > <NCBI TaxonID is the Concept>
- it might be better to have your "has close match" links in the dwc:Taxon, that links to the geospecies object, and other objects such as IT IS concepts?
Yes, if NameAccordingToID is supposed to point to formal description then I will need to do something else.
sorry to be pedantic, but it is probably more for my benefit, than yours - ie to help me understand how I should do such a thing myself.
No, I did not think you were being pedantic. How else are we supposed to figure out how these should look and work? Someone else showed me how to
do the foaf:primaryTopic etc. with the understanding that will explain it to other people. I am still not clear on how to produce correct dwc, so the only way to get it right is to mark up some examples, fail and then keep trying until we have something that works as people expect.
I would eventually like to get my observation records to work in a way that does not break what I do have working.
Also I think that people are thinking of me and my not exactly TDWG'y examples as a problem when they really should be more worried about
the large number of very influential people that think that the NCBI taxon id is the species concept. Their is a small window of time in which we can design something that will be adopted and used by non-taxonomists, after which every described species will have a NCBI taxon id that is "close
enough" to satisfy most potential users.
Thanks and Happy Holidays!
- Pete
Looks really good though.
Kevin
Hi TDWG'ers,
After Gail's ECN email I made up a demo/trial DarwinCore Occurrence Record of one of Dan's beetle records.
You can click through the various parts via uriburner
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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
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