My turn to respond after traffic-jam reflections....
What we need to realize is that in doing this, we are establishing establishing dwc:Individual as the de facto "aggregation" unit of the sort we have talked about previously. I suppose that is OK as long as we provide sufficient means for humans or semantic reasoners to be able to know what they are getting information about when they retrieve metadata about an Individual. That can be done for humans by making appropriate comments in the proposed dwc:individualRemarks . For machines, I have been re-thinking the idea of having dwc:individualCount being a property of an Individual. In an earlier post, I suggested that it should remain a property of Occurrences, since the number of Individuals can change over time (think wolf pack or plant deme over time).
In my mind, if the "Individual" is something like a wolf pack, and the wolf pack changes composition over time, then you're really dealing with different instances of a "wolf pack" (not just different occurrences of the same individual). There may be a desire to relate the two Wolf Packs together in some semantic way, of course.
However, in the current context, something like dwc:individualCount (if not individualCount itself) that is a property of Individual could have controlled values of "1" and ">1".
Hmmm....I'd rather keep individualCount as a numeric value (rather than a controleld vocabulary), to allow specific values to be provided for numbers of specimens in a lot, numbers of individuals seen in an observation, etc.
If you want a controlled vocabulary for semantic purposes, I'd favor something like a new term "individualScope" being used for such purposes. Values in a controlled vocabulary might include things like "Single", "Group", "Aggregate" "Absent", etc., each with carefully worded definitions.
The other issue would be how to indicate that one of these "aggregate" (individualCount>1) Individuals was segregated into several Individuals at a lower taxonomic level (e.g. partially sorted lots of marine organisms get more sorted, fossil aggregations get separated into individual fossils, an image of a forest has individual trees delineated). Rich has stated that this would be necessary any time subsets of the original Individual were given divergent Identifications and I agree totally. Assigning new GUIDs to these new Individuals would be no problem and I suppose Pete's suggestion of using "hasPart" and "isPartOf" could be used to establish the relationships between the original Individual and its "children".
Yup, I think we're on the same page on this one.
If the proposed addition goes through, we need to have a really good Google Code entry that summarizes the understanding that we have come to in this discussion (if we have come to one! :-).
Agreed. We also need to be clear on what terms that currently fall within the Occurrence class should properly move to a new Individual Class. My vote would be for:
individualID (unless moved to Record-level terms) individualCount preparations disposition previousIdentifications associatedSequences
This also assumes that dwc:catalogNumber and dwc:otherCatalogNumbers be re-assigned to Record-level terms. Was there some reason this isn't appropriate?
Some of these are certainly debatable. For example, the PreservedSpecimen-centric "preparations" and "disposition" really do seem to me to be properties of the Individual, not of the Occurrence at which the Individual was extracted from nature. But I can see a problem when the same Individual is first seen in nature, then is extracted later as a specimen; in which case it seems weired to include these properties at the level of Individual.
I think if we were going to be really pure about this, we should generate two instances of Individual for each PreservedSpecimen: one representing effectively an observation at the moment of capture (which would technically have as basisOfRecord "LivingSpecimen" or "HumanObservation", and is linked to the Occurrence), and the other representing the preserved specimen after it is curated and processed (linked appropriately to the first Individual instance).
But I think that's going too far.
OK, enough for a while....
Aloha, Rich