Yes, that’s a fair point!  In a sense, the ID has intrinsic value on its own if for no other reason than to represent a reference point for aggregation.

Nevertheless, I still maintain that if it fulfills that purpose, then it implies a “thing” (around which other “things” are aggregated), and I can’t imagine such a “thing” that we would care about for aggregating purposes, about which we would not associate other property values.

I say all this quite deliberately in reference to “dwc:individualID”, of course…. J

Aloha,

Rich

From: Markus Döring [mailto:m.doering@mac.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2013 7:56 PM
To: Jason Holmberg
Cc: Richard Pyle; TDWG Content Mailing List; Robert Whitton; John Deck; Ramona Walls
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] New Darwin Core terms proposed relating to material samples

The id value is actually very useful and the only trustworthy way of grouping records, e.g. all occurrences of the same whale.

Markus