There is a series of jokes, and an entire TV quiz show, essentially starting from the meme "What is the question to which the answer is <X>". Now, I am not a biologist (surprise!), so it is likely that domain ignorance leaves me unable to understand whether all the postings in the thread about new DwC term resolution are arguing from the same set of questions their authors hope to have answered by a resolution of the term "Individual". (It's even a little unclear to me whether everybody has the same notion of "resolution of a term", but that's a whole different discussion, which would contain a lot of uses of "rdf:type" and the contentious "rdfs:domain").
I speculate that lengthy term definition debates would be shorter if they started with agreement on competency questions for the term. Competency questions are sort of usage scenarios cast as questions. See http://marinemetadata.org/references/competencyquestionsoverview .
Bob Morris
On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 2:41 AM, Richard Pyle deepreef@bishopmuseum.org wrote:
My turn to disagree (strongly, in this case). It's not an instance of a taxon, it's an instance of an Organism. A taxon is merely a non-factual (i.e., opinion-based) attribute of an organism, secondarily associated via an Identification instance.
I could probably be comfortable with "OrganismInstance"; but in that case, why not just "Organism" as Paul suggested? Isn't "Instance" sort of implied by all the classes?
I am certainly open to debate about where the "upper boundary" of an instance of this class, and I agree that "population" could be interpreted more as a low level of "taxon", rather than a high level of "organism". But I certainly don't think that instances of this class should be limited to a singular organism. Would a coral head then constitute thousands of instances of this class? Surely such colonies could be collapsed into a single instance of this class. And the same would likely also be useful for colonies of insects (ants, termites, bees, etc.), as well as small groups (pack of wolves, pod of whales, etc.); not to mention a specimen "lot" in a Museum collection.
I agree it should have only *one* taxon, but that there should be no upper limit on the rank of this taxon. If more than one taxon is identified, then there needs to be a separate instance of this class for each identified taxon. But this only applies when multiple taxa are acknowledged -- it does NOT restrict multiple taxa being linked to the same instance via multiple identifications when there is a difference of opinion about what the correct taxon identity should be. In other words, an instance of this class may be identified as "A" *or* "B", but could not legitimately be identified as "A" *and* "B" simultaneously (except, perhaps in the case of hybrids, but that's another situation altogether).
More later.
Aloha, Rich
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content- bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 10:09 AM To: Steven J. Baskauf Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] New terms need resolution: "Individual"
represent a single taxon. I think that Individual is probably not a good name due to confusion with the technical use of that term
elsewhere.
TaxonInstance seems to me to be perhaps most precise. Personally I have a problem merging individual with population, since population -> metapopulation -> subspecies form a continuum in my understanding. But I am quite willing to be pragmatical :-)
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