Crap. I accidentally sent that before I was tready to send it. I'll continue where I ended:
The risk that we make the definition of Individual so broad that it can't perform any of the functions it was defined to serve.
...or so narrow that it can only perform a fraction of what we'd like it to serve.....
We've already lost one of them (the ability to infer duplicates) when I agreed to the broader definition, but that's the subject of another post.
Huh? I don't understand how we've lost the ability to infer duplicates, and what aspect of the broader definition caused us to lose it.
I think that what I I have suggested above is very unrestrictive. We let evidence be the type of things that they are (PreservedSpecimens, Individuals, StillImages, SoundRecordings, DNA sequences, etc.). We don't determine their type by what we want to use them for. That was the mistake that I made in the Biodiversity Informatics paper. If we follow this approach, then a StillImage can fill any role that we want: evidence that an Occurrence happened, information to support an Identification, a character for a visual key, a logo, etc. We let it fulfill those roles by giving it an identifier and connecting it to other resources using appropriate terms (hasEvidence, derivedFrom, mrtg:attributionLogoURL, etc.
I guess what I still don't quite understand is how we represent the attributes of the "evidence" in DwC.
I'm out of time for now. Will address the other emails later.
Aloha, Rich