On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 7:29 AM, Steve Baskauf
<steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
In my previous understanding of Occurrence in which a single token was
incorporated as a part of an Occurrence, I considered an Individual to
have ceased to exist and to have become an Occurrence of type
LivingSpecimen when it was collected to be part of a collection (e.g.
zoo). Given this understanding, I felt that there were few or no cases
where the establishmentMeans of an Individual would change (excluding
its capture and incorporation in a collection) and therefore it made
sense for having a single establishmentMeans value for the individual.
However, under the apparent consensus opinion that the token documenting
an Occurrence is a separate entity, I no longer believe that there is
any purpose in recognizing an entity called "LivingSpecimen". A living
specimen is simply an individual with curation information. The token
for an Occurrence that involves the collection of a living specimen is
the Individual itself (in the case of removal of the entire organism) or
a different Individual (i.e. in the case where a new individual is
propagated vegetatively from the Individual being documented by the
Occurrence). Given this understanding, the establishmentMeans of an
Individual can change over time, so it is not possible for every
Individual to have a single value for establishmentMeans.
The consensus that seems to have emerged from the tdwg-content
discussion is that dwc:establishmentMeans is a complex thing that
describes the relationship of an Individual to a Location that can
change over time. I do not see how establishmentMeans is a property of
an Occurrence - in fact it is not clear to me exactly how one applies
establishmentMeans as a property to an instance of any existing DwC
class. But in any case, there does not now seem to be any advantage to
moving it from the class Occurrence to the proposed class Individual, so
I officially withdraw my proposal if that is possible. Alternatively,
the TAG could take a vote and vote the proposal down, but I think that
would be a waste of time.
Steve
--
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address:
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