Thanks, Steve. I'll keep my responses as minimal as possible.
I think that pretty much everybody agrees that "individual" is a confusing term name for a number of reasons.
And I agree as well. I hope it's clear that we latched on to that term only because, at the time, it was the closest term to what we needed, and in many cases it's better to stick with an existing (even if potentially confusing) term than it is to invent a new (but nearly identical) term -- which risks creating even more confusion. As I have said, I think we should sort out the concepts first, then we should debate about the appropriate terms to label the concepts.
Although there is potentially significant overlap between the proposed dwc:MaterialSample class and Individual, I think that there are at least two ways that they differ significantly. One is that I'm pretty sure that there is no requirement that a dwc:MaterialSample must be a biological material (i.e. derived from a living thing).
In my mind, this doesn't really count as a "difference", because in our model, an "Individual" does not need to be biological material either. However, I concede that this is a bastardization of the original intent of dwc:individualID, so I'm ready to completely abandon the term "individual". My real concern is that we do not maintain parallel and largely overlapping terms. Following your suggestion, I would therefore recommend that we move towards deprecating dwc:individualID, and do one of the following:
1) Replace it with dwc:materialSampleID and establish a new materialSample class; or 2) Replace it with [someOtherLabel]ID and establish a new someOtherLabel class
But as I keep saying, the most important thing I think we need to discuss is whether the original intent of dwc:individualID:
"An identifier for an individual or named group of individual organisms represented in the Occurrence. Meant to accommodate resampling of the same individual or group for monitoring purposes. May be a global unique identifier or an identifier specific to a data set."
...encompasses (or should be redefined to encompass) what is needed to accommodate the needs of the proposed dwc:materialSample:
"The category of information pertaining to the physical results of a sampling (or subsampling) event. In biological collections, the material sample is typically collected, and either preserved or destructively processed."
Are we better served by a single class of thing that includes both definitions (with defined subclasses as needed)? Or are we better off with two completely separate classes of things? For reasons that would require far too much text to describe here, I strongly favor the former.
I can't express a preference for how best to label this concept (or these separate concepts) until I know what the concepts are.
I think that it's pretty clear from what Rich has said that Individual (to include the range from tissue samples up to herds) must consist of
biological materials.
No, that's not correct. In our model, "Individual" includes things that are decidedly *not* biological. Biological things are a subset of instances of our "Individual".
The other is that a material sample must be physically sampled (i.e.
removed
from the environment and subjected to some kind of processing). An
important
feature of an Individual (at least to me!) is that it can be observed,
photographed,
or recorded without necessarily having all or part of it being removed
from its environment
and subjected to processing.
Yes -- exactly. I think we need a superclass that can be applied physical objects (either biological, or non-biological). A subset of these things are biological. Another subset of these things are extracted from nature. Another subset is subsampled and used for some sort of destructive or non-destructive analysis.
There is nothing in the current definitions of the type vocabulary terms
that require its
classes to be disjoint. I think it is possible that something could be
both a
dwctype:PreservedSpecimen and a dwctype:FossilSpecimen, and if dwctype:MaterialSample is accepted as a term there would undoubtedly be
things
that were both dwctype:PreservedSpecimen and dwctype:MaterialSample. So I
don't think
it is necessarily a problem if there is overlap between
dwctype:MaterialSample and an Individual class.
Certainly RDF allows a resource to have two (or more) rdf:type
declarations.
Sure -- but we are setting ourselves up for chaos if we leave it open for individual providers to apply one class or another to the same physical thing.
Aloha, Rich