Steve et al.,
I've created a page on the TDWG TAG wiki for historical documents and diagrams and posted the ASC model there.
http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/HistoricalDocuments
This may not be the best place for this, but I think TDWG should and will try to keep things like this available for their historical significance.
I think this was the first published model to specify the Locality, CollectingEvent, CollectingUnit chain of relationships. It think it was also the first to specify CollectingUnit as a series of subtypes. I think those features have held up pretty well over the intervening years (almost 2 decades!). As you will see, it was missing all the necessary detail to implement a real database, but many subsequent models and DBs reflected these concepts. Note also that the model never made it into any formal standards process, so remained a draft.
The next significant modeling efforts got very elaborate, such as the MVZ and Specify models, but those were explicitly for guiding the development of single applications, not for data exchange. As we got into data exchange with XML documents and XML schema specifications, we saw a strong disagreement within the TDWG (biodiversity informatics) community about the advisability of very simple and limited specifications (DarwinCore), versus very complex specifications (ABCD).
Over the last decade, what we have done in (most of?) the biodiversity information networks is to deploy application schemas; the data specification is used by a relatively limited number of software tools. With RDF I think we are trying to break the binding between a consuming application and a single source schema. I think this is still a thorny problem, however, and detailed conceptual models will have uses, but any single model will have its limits. What will be interesting, I think, will be to show how databases made for different purposes can be integrated with well-designed conceptual models and RDF. We need to hear from the other RDF wonks about the principles we should be using in constructing our schemas, like the warnings about property ranges and domains (which I still don't understand).
Cheers,
-Stan
On 10/25/10 7:30 PM, "Steve Baskauf" steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
Are these things available online somewhere? URLs? What's the ASC model? Steve
Richard Pyle wrote:
early documents that go into a lot of this in great detail. One is Stan Blum's description of the ASC model. Another are a series of publications from Walter Berendsohn on "potential taxa". A lot of other stuff is floating around the Specify project, and there are some other earlier sources. But I agree, it's not easy to find, and it doesn't always cover the details we need it to in today's context.