I looked up "hasPart" and "isPartOf" and came up with: http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-hasPart and http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-isPartOf
The RDF associated with the URIs: http://purl.org/dc/terms/hasPart (i.e. dcterms:hasPart) http://purl.org/dc/terms/isPartOf (i.e. dcterms:isPartOf) seems relatively "safe" in that I don't think it implies anything that is not true about the relationship between "composite" Individuals and their child/subset Individuals that have been identified to a more precise taxonomic level. Both terms are subproperties of dcterms:relation which also seems to correctly represent the connection between the parent and child Individuals.
If one wanted to convey more information about the relationship (such as the fact that the child Individuals would be members of all of the taxonomic groups that their parents were members of, or things like that), I suppose one could define more specific DwC properties (perhaps subproperties of dcterms:hasPart and dcterms:isPartOf) that carried more "baggage". Again, careful thought would be needed first.
Steve
Richard Pyle wrote:
Maybe the "somethings" will all be identified to the same species, and maybe they'll all be identified to different species. When we get to that stage, if more than one taxon is represented within what was previosuly regarded as a single Individual, then we generate new Individual instances that correspond to the different taxon identifications, and tag them accordingly with their own Identifications (maintaining, of course, the approproiate "derived from" relatioships among the Individuals).
They will want to relate that specimen back to the jar it came from.
Yes, definitely! We certainly want to have a mechanism to address Dean's point about Individuals derived from Individuals, whether it be a parent-child sort of derivation, or something more general, is a topic for another thread.