This is a good point and one with which I generally agree. In this particular case, the term IndividualOrganism has its roots in the discussion of last October/November. At that time, I had proposed adding a class to Darwin Core called dwc:Individual which would be the object of the existing term dwc:individualID. In that discussion, there were various options that were thrown around for the class name but in the end, it was left as Individual to correspond with the individualID term (in the same way that dwc:occurrenceID goes with dwc:Occurrence, dwc:eventID goes with dwc:Event, etc.). Since Cam and my intention was for the class dsw:IndividualOrganism to mean the same thing as I had originally wanted the proposed dwc:Individual class to mean, we stuck with the "Individual" part even though the definition always allowed for small groups of organisms (see the definition of dwc:individualID at http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#individualID). However, since DSW is designed for the semantic web/LOD world and since "individual" has a different technical meaning in that context, we thought "IndividualOrganism" was more clear than just "Individual" (I think Pete DeVries first suggested IndividualOrganism somewhere in the discussion). Whether or not that was the best choice or not, I don't know. Often "IndividualOrganism" actually does correspond to an individual organism, so calling it that does allow for a certain amount of visualization of what it represents, although as the discussion of Oct/Nov showed, there may be problems associated with trying to put too much concrete meaning on something that is essentially abstract.

By the way, as far as I know the proposal for the dwc:Individual class is still on the table since as far as I know the TAG has taken no action to submit it to an up or down vote. Given that, I suppose there is still some rationale for maintaining a connection between dsw:IndividualOrganism and the proposed dwc:Individual class, although as the definition of the dwc:Individual class was left when the subject was dropped, it was allowed to have instances which were taxonomically heterogeneous (unlike dsw:IndividualOrganism). In that sense, the proposed dwc:Individual class is more like what we called "LivingEntity" in the alternative ontology (see http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/wiki/TaxonomicHeterogeneity for more on this). At this point, I have lost interest in the dwc:Individual class proposal, since with DSW we are accomplishing what I wanted to do with that proposal (i.e. provide clearly defined class names that could be used with rdf:type, to provide a means to infer duplicates, and allow for resampling). In particular, we reached the conclusion that the dwc:xxxxxxID terms were not useful in the context of RDF since their meaning was not clear. Instead, we defined new terms to connect the classes that had clear domains and ranges, so dwc:individualID is not really relevant to the discussion in the context of DSW.

Steve

Mark Wilden wrote:

2011/4/28 Steve Baskauf <steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu>:

As a point of
clarification, the class dsw:IndividualOrganism as we have defined it in DSW
does not specify that an instance of the class must actually be an
individual organism [...] At
one point we considered using the name TaxonomicallyHomogeneousEntity, but
that seemed unwieldy.


If that's what it is, then that's what it should be called, in my
opinion. To have the term InvidualOrganism not actually mean
"individual organism" is asking for trouble. Call it what it is, then
try to think of a better term. But don't use the wrong term just
because it's less unwieldy.

That's how I name things, as a programmer (not an ontology-creator).
In general, if I find that a thing is hard to name, then I don't
really understand what it represents. Some concepts are simply
unwieldy, though, but the name should still be accurate.

My two cents - no doubt worth less. :)

///ark
Web Applications Developer
Center for Applied Biodiversity Informatics
California Academy of Sciences
.

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Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

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