Markus,
Thanks for your input on this.  I agree that working this out in the ontology is important.  My major concern is the rate at which this is likely to happen.  I had the impression that the ontology development was being slowed by lack of resources and the progress that I've noticed so far seems to be focused mainly on the taxonomy end.  In some sense the ontology has been overloaded in that it must not only define the relationships among TDWG resources/entities but also must serve as the mechanism for typing resources that have been assigned GUIDs (assuming that the draft GUID applicability statement or something like it is adopted in the near future). 

[For reference purposes, recommendation 11 of the draft TDWG GUID Applicability Statement is:
"Objects in the biodiversity informatics domain that are identified by a GUID should be typed using the TDWG ontology or other well-known vocabularies in accordance with the TDWG common architecture."]

The adoption of GUIDs by the biodiversity community is already hampered by the technical barriers created by the requirement that they be actionable and that authorities must persist forever.  So GUID adoption doesn't need any more roadblocks beyond that.  I would request that if it is not possible to fully implement classes in the ontology that correspond to all of the the xxxxxID terms in the Darwin Core standard, then either create some kind of "placeholder" HTTP: URIs in the ontology that can be used for the typing of GUIDs, or offload the role of GUID typing from the ontology to something else (the "other well-known vocabularies" of the recommendation).  I do not like the latter alternative, but people are not going to wait forever to start creating GUIDs and since recommendation 11 is a "should" statement rather than a "must" statement, if something isn't done about this soon we will start seeing the appearance of untyped GUIDs, which is not a good thing.

Steve Baskauf

Markus Döring wrote: 
Steve,
a very reasonable addition to DarwinCore indeed. But I tend to agree with John that we should first tackle this in the ontology development which is taking place right now mainly driven by Roger and Dave. Classes in DwC were created in a slightly ad hoc fashion based on what data we were already exchanging - primarily occurrences and taxonomic. So they are not covering all needs. But instead of quickly adding more classes one by one I would hope to get a better overview of required classes first. The current refactoring of the ontology is a perfect oppertunity for this. With the ontology developing we also need to make sure how to synchronise it with DwC terms. I can imagine that it turns out best to add new ontology classes and even properties to DwC once we found them to be stable and agreed. I guess all Im saying is with DwC moving forward a lot last year and now being ratified I prefer to give it a rest and adopt it as is and pass the torch on to the ontology development
 which has been mostly standing still last year.

Markus


Am Jan 22, 2010 um 3:31 schrieb Steve Baskauf:

  
This issue is with reference to 
http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/issues/detail?id=69

I have proposed the creation of a new Darwin Core term, Individual, that 
is a class representing individual organisms in their environment (as 
opposed to live organisms in collections which would be Occurrences of 
type LivingSpecimen).  The justification for this new term is given at 
the link above, but to summarize, this class is needed:
1. to establish the concept of an individual (in the sense of the object 
of dwc:individualID) and its relationship to other classes in the TDWG 
ontology.
2. to provide a way for users who assign a GUID as a value for the dwc 
term individualID to meet Recommendation 11 (regarding GUID typing) of 
the draft TDWG GUID Applicability Statement. 

I should also note that the problem that my proposal is intended to 
resolve may exist for other terms in the new Darwin Core standard that 
can refer to resources that can be identified with GUIDs.  In 
particular, there may be no existing classes in the TDWG ontology
http://tdwg-ontology.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ontology/voc/
for GUID-labeled resources that are referenced by identificationID 
datasetID, eventID, and locationID .  The lack of an appropriate means 
to type objects identified by GUIDs is only one of the impediments to 
the implementation of GUIDs in the biodiversity community, but it is one 
that can be solved relatively quickly by appropriate action on the part 
of the TDWG technical architecture group.

Steve Baskauf

-- 
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

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-- 
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

postal mail address:
VU Station B 351634
Nashville, TN  37235-1634,  U.S.A.

delivery address:
2125 Stevenson Center
1161 21st Ave., S.
Nashville, TN 37235

office: 2128 Stevenson Center
phone: (615) 343-4582,  fax: (615) 343-6707
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu