Note that associatedOccurrences is one of the several terms that are meant to allow lists of relationships between resources to be captured in a single field. Others include associatedMedia, associatedReferences, associatedSequnces, and associatedTaxa. The main purposes of these fields is to provide a mechanism to share relationship information in a flat application profile such as the Simple Darwin Core (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/simple/index.htm). If an application profile isn't constrained by being flat, then there is a much more robust way to capture relationships, using the ResourceRelationship class and it's constituent terms (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#relindex).

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 6:39 PM, Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com> wrote:
Good idea, but it suffers from the same fate as might
associatedOccurrences  (not previously mentioned because I was after
some clarification in principle, with the herbarium duplicate sheets
only one current case of interest): I need to follow whatever the
community practice is of regarding a sheet as part of a duplicate set
distributed by the original collector.  I'm told by the people at the
Harvard University Herbaria that "duplicate" usually, but not always,
means from the same organism and same collection event---occasionally
people used to put several organisms on the same sheet, raising the
possibility that they are not even the same taxon. Worse,  the
different parts of the same organism might be catalogued as separate
specimens. In this case, an assertion that they are from the same
individual might be true and understandable, but the utility of that
assertion depends on your purpose. Consider a use case in which one
set of traditional duplicates all have a determination that is out of
date, but another specimen---say your acorn collected later from the
same tree---has a current determination.  For purposes of notifying
duplicate holders that a new determination has been made to the
original, the later acorn may not be interesting. This means that for
this use, a distributed query of the form "find all records with the
same dwc:individualID" is not as useful as "find all records with the
same dwc:eventID".

Also, as Mark writes, it doesn't address any other associatedOccurrences.

More generally, we are working on annotations of data records.
Probably what the real issue here is that associatedOccurrences is an
assertion about organisms, and we are making assertions about
occurrence data.

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Steve Baskauf
<steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> Bob,
> It seems to me that the most semantically clear way to indicate in a
> machine-readable way that two herbarium sheets are duplicates would be to
> assert that they have the same dwc:individualID.  individualID is defined as
> "An identifier for an individual or named group of individual organisms
> represented in the Occurrence" so asserting that two occurrences represent
> the same individual or named group of individual organisms pretty much
> exactly describes what duplicate specimens are.  I use this same approach to
> indicate that
> http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/67307
> is an image of an acorn from the same tree:
> http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/ind-baskauf/67304
> as the bark image
> http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/67312
> I won't say more here as I have written more extensively on this approach in
> Biodiversity Informatics 7:17-44
> (https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jbi/article/view/3664).  You can also
> look at the RDF associated with those GUIDs to see what I mean.  Solving
> this problem is also one of the reasons I have proposed adding the class
> Individual to DwC (i.e. so that the individuals that are the object of
> dwc:individualID can be rdfs:type'd using a well-known vocabulary and
> therefore be "understood" by linked data clients).
>
> Steve
>
> Bob Morris wrote:
>
> http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#associatedOccurrences   carries
> this description:
>
> associatedOccurrences
> Identifier:   http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/associatedOccurrences
> Class:        http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Occurrence
> Definition:   A list (concatenated and separated) of identifiers of
> other Occurrence records and their associations to this Occurrence.
> Comment:      Example: "sibling of FMNH:Mammal:1234; sibling of
> FMNH:Mammal:1235". For discussion see
> http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Occurrence
> Details:      associatedOccurrences
>
> My questions:
> a.  Are the names of the associations, and/or the syntax of the value
> meant to be community defined?
> b. If no to a. , where are those definitions? If yes, Have any
> communities defined any names and syntax? I am especially interested
> in "duplicate of" in the case of herbarium sheets."
> c. (May share an answer with b.) Is there any use being made by anyone
> in which associatedOccurrences is designed to have machine-readable
> values.  If yes, where?
>
> Thanks
> Bob
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> 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
>



--
Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: morris.bob@gmail.com
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
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