On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Richard Pyle <deepreef@bishopmuseum.org> wrote:
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If you're talking about these as two separate classes in DwC, I'm getting very nervous. There is very little ambiguity between an instance of "Locality" and an instance of "Taxon". Same can be said for the other DwC classes (except, maybe, Event and Occurrence -- but I think most people would not have any trouble deciding what those two things are). However, I see a lot of ambiguity between were an Individual ends, and a BiologicalObject(=AccessionedUnit) begins. To me that says that dividing them into separate classes is inviting confusion and inconsistent application of DwC to existing (and most future) datasets. ...
Not necessarily. If two classes share some but not all properties, you can make them be children of a common parent class which holds (or dare I say "is the domain of") the common properties. Then the not-common properties can be put on each class as appropriate. Finally, you can arrange that nothing is ever in both classes (or more precisely, that a reasoner would signal so if it were). Bob -- 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)