I really don't know why you insist in saying that taxa are abstract concepts. Yes, linnean taxa are but othrwise taxa are very real, so real that they are = to clades. I assume DwC will deal with taxa in general and not just Linnean artifacts.
Nico
Sent from my iPhone
On Jul 14, 2011, at 10:31 AM, Richard Pyle deepreef@bishopmuseum.org wrote:
Viruses differ in other ways as well (no Linnean-style names, different fundamental concepts for what a "Taxon" is, many biologists don't even include them within the scope of "life", etc.) I'm not sure "Organism" is any more inconsistent with population than it is with a coral colony or two members of the same species; but I agree more careful though would be useful here.
I'm not married to "organism", but I *really* don't like the word "taxon" embedded in the term. Taxa are abstract notions, invented by humans. What I think we need a term for is an explicit indication of the physical "stuff of life".
I think that DwC is very, very close to having what we need to represent almost all of the information we're interested in. I think one of the main problems with the existing DwC is that "Occurrence" is overloaded -- too many disparate things are being force-fit into instances of that class, and it gets a bit messy. Most of the other DwC classes are pretty consistently understood and utilized by the community. I think this conversation we're having now (the introduction of a new class) should really focus on how best to define that class in such a way that it maximally enhances data sharing. In other words, it should solve a problem, and should enable new features for information exchange that satisfy a need. Also, as we define it, part of the definition is figuring out which existing attributes of "Occurrence" that the new class should inherit.
My own understanding of the core DwC classes (with my own interpretation of "Occurrence" added) are as follows:
Locality: A defined place.
Event: The intersection of a Locality and a specific window of time, with metadata pertaining to some action that happened at that place & time.
Taxon: an *implicit* set of organisms circumscribed by a taxon concept and labeled with a taxon name
Organism: an *explicit*set of one or more instances of organisms (sensu lato, including viruses?).
Occurrence: the intersection of an Event and an Organism.
Identification: the intersection of an Organism and a Taxon.
Steve created some very useful diagrams of this sort of thing the last time we had this conversation (Steve: can you re-post the link to your diagrams?)
Aloha, Rich
-----Original Message----- From: Gregor Hagedorn [mailto:g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2011 11:52 AM To: Richard Pyle Cc: Steven J. Baskauf; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] New terms need resolution: "Individual"
On 14 July 2011 08:41, Richard Pyle deepreef@bishopmuseum.org wrote:
My turn to disagree (strongly, in this case). It's not an instance of a taxon, it's an instance of an Organism. A taxon is merely a non-factual (i.e., opinion-based) attribute of an organism, secondarily associated via an Identification instance.
WIth respect to organism: strictly, Viruses are not organisms, but I could
live
with that. But the goal is to find a term including population. Population definitely
is not
an organism.
I believe the instances of taxon are organisms, populations, individuals.
Gregor
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