As one of the primary brawlers on this topic, I've already said enough
about
it, so I will restrain myself and just say that I fully support the
proposal.
As another of the primary brawlers, I fully concur with Steve's comments below. Nice job, John!
Well, mostly restrain myself... I will make one comment about what John said below. Although it is true that a CollectionObject (or "evidence")
would
probably need to have been derived from an organism to be relevant in the Darwin Core context, there is no reason why a CollectionObject cannot simultaneously serve as evidence that the Organism existed, that an Occurrence occurred, and as support for an Identification. Particularly in the case of specimens, it is likely that the
CollectionObject will
usually serve all three purposes at once. A CollectionObject could
actually
serve as "evidence" for anything you want. To some extent, that's one of the reasons for decoupling PreservedSpecimen from Occurrence.
I think I might agree with this, but I want to ask a simple question:
To what objects would an Identification instance apply? In other words, an Identification instance represents a link between an instance of Taxon to an instance of [XXXXXXX].
In my mind, this should always be "Organism". To me, neither an Occurrence instance or a CollectionObject instance has a taxonomic identity. Thinking about it in database terms, an Occurrence represents a join-table between Events (Place+time) and Organisms, and CollectionObjects represent the providence for the Organism.
I agree with Steve that a CollectionObject can certainly provide evidence that assists with Identifications and for documenting Occurrences. However, that doesn't mean that I think that there should be direct relationships between instances of Occurrence or CollectionObject with instances of Identification, or directly between CollectionObject and Occurrence (these should happen through an Organism).
However, I also fully understand that assertions of this sort are outside the scope of DwC (more an issue of onology), so this may not be the right time & place to raise this issue.
Aloha, Rich