I agree with most of the statements made during this thread (the majority of which were posted prior to sunrise in Hawaii).
I thought that was the reason others had introduced "event"
as place +
time. Otherwise, what is the reason for "event"?
I was wondering the same thing. Event=(Location, Time) strikes me as weird, for a couple of reasons:
i. Intuitively, an event is something that happens at a region of space/time, not the region itself.
ii. More significantly, a DwC:event is a container for metadata that gets attached to occurrences via eventID. A DwC:event corresponds to the intuitive definition above, since you can have multiple DwC:events over the same space/time region, e.g. two groups surveying for different taxa, using different methodologies.
A couple of things:
1) In my mind, an Event is, and has always been, in its most fundamental form, a "tuple" (exercising my new vocabulary) of Location + Time, both of which are scoped in some way.
2) Less clear is whether an "Event" also includes things like collectors, collection method, habitat description, etc. (deliberately avoiding dwc terms at the moment).
3) Coming back to point 1, an Event does not necessarily need to be treated as a tuple of Location + Time, if you vew it from the perspective of 4-dimensional space-time (with time representing the 4th dimension, in addtion to the more conventional 3 dimensions of space). Location is already a tuple of latitude and longitude; and indeed is most properly represented as a triple of latitude+longitude+altitude (X+Y+Z). Time is simply the fouth dimension. In other words, there is a fundamental argument that could be made that really Location+Time boils down to a single coordinate in 4-dimensional space-time.
Side Note to Jim Croft: We're still only treading on the outskirts of weirdness -- we still have a lot of weirdness-space that we have yet to venture into.
Aloha, Rich