On Wed, 5 Jan 2011, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
Couldn't this be addressed using subscripts? E.g. MeasurementID_1="tail length" MeasurementID_2="brain volume" MeasurementUnit_1="cm" MeasurementUnit_2="cubic cm" MeasurementValue_1="9" MeasurementValue_2="8"
I have no problems with pragmatism, but why are the characters not RDF concepts itself? I believe they should be rdf vocabularies for those who want to reason on them.
First, please let me correct myself. Everywhere I wrote "MeasurementID", I should have written "measurementType". To your point ...
Recommended best practice for DwC:measurementType is to use a controlled vocabulary. The controlled vocabulary can be an ontology. I was using literals only for simplicity of illustration. (We should probably start collecting controlled vocabularies/ontologies to point to from the documentation.)
One more problem: the states can be polymorphic, as in
MeasurementID_1="flower color" MeasurementValue_1="red" MeasurementValue_1="orange"
Yes, although I don't see it as a problem. I'm not sure why the following restriction (from the Simple Darwin Core reference) is necessary: "Every field in the Simple Darwin Core may appear either once or not at all in a single record." For example, we considered the bioblitz records to be simple Darwin Core, even though there were multiple taxonConceptID columns (for the same scientificName).
Joel.
Gregor