I am pleased with the significant and thoughtful discussion that has taken place on the tdwg-content email list regarding the relationships among Occurrences, Individuals, and other entities that are a part of the community's thinking about biodiversity metadata and the way that those metadata are structured. It appears from the discussion that there is widespread acceptance of the idea that Individual as a concept has a place in the structuring of biodiversity metadata and that there is some consensus of what "Individual" means (i.e. an entity ranging from actual biological individuals to small coherent populations that can reliably be asserted to represent a single taxon). Whether that acceptance and consensus constitutes a compelling need for adding two new terms (the class dwc:Individual and dwc:individualRemarks) to the Darwin Core standard or not is the point of a TAG "vote". Given the discussion that has occurred, it seems to me that there are two reasons why there is an actual need for those terms. One reason is that if members of the Darwin Core constituency intend to structure their metadata in a fully normalized manner that includes grouping Occurrences by Individuals (and it appears that there are at least several who intend to do this), the term dwc:individualRemarks is needed to provide a means indicate the nature of the individual (i.e. is it a biological individual, clonal individuals, a small population, etc.?) and the class dwc:Individual is needed as the category within which to put individualRemarks so as to indicate that individualRemarks is a property of Individuals. The second reason for explicitly recognizing Individual as a class is that it would place a term representing the concept of "Individual" within a "well-known vocabulary". I feel that would be critical for facilitating the ultimate development of a recommendation for the representation of Darwin Core as RDF.
At this point, it is not clear to me that there are any other existing DwC terms that should be moved to a new Individual class. Originally, I suggested that individualCount should be placed in that class, but I no longer think so. Counting the number of individuals is really something that happens when an Occurrence takes place and a small cohesive group of a single taxon (e.g. wolf pack or plant population) could have an individualCount that changes over time. As was discussed earlier in on the email list, the xxxxxxID terms probably really belong in the Record-level terms category rather than being listed within particular classes. So I don't believe that dwc:individualID should be in the proposed class either. As I detailed in my Biodiversity Informatics paper, an Individual is really an entity that serves primarily as a node that allows the grouping of other resources (namely Occurrences and Identifications). As such, it really has few (or no) properties that can be known outside of Occurrences.
Thus I would like to "call the question" on the issue of the proposal. I would suggest that the issue of adding the class dwc:Individual and the term dwc:individualRemarks within it be addressed in a single vote, since there little point in having one term without the other. I would also hope that those on the TAG who choose to vote would review the list discussion carefully first. Given that the question of "what exactly is an Individual?" came up a few times after that question was clearly answered in the thread is an indication that some people entered the thread later on without the benefit of having read some of the earlier posts.
Steve