What exactly is accomplished by requiring "taxonomically homogenous?" Perhaps the problem is that Organism is a subclass of something slightly more general, some more general "biologically organized" object that has a context dependent organizing principle. For example, biologists seem willing to talk about ecosystem instances in this way. Also, for some purposes, people seem willing to have discourse about an organism in which they include microbes that must survive not only on or in the organism, but even a tiny bit away from it. So, if one had a slightly more general class, and Organism is required to have some enumerated set of specific kinds of organizing principles, e.g. those presently on the table, several things happen: (a)those who need to have a different organizing principle than the current consensus of what organizes an Organism have a place to hang their organizing principle, (b) scientific advances about the organizing principles of life don't require massive ontological disruption(*)...you just move a principle into the appropriate subclass.
Bob Morris aka Recovering Algebraist
(*)well, I suppose the important ones do for the biologists, but I suspect they needn't for the formal ontologies, if the upper level organizing principle is "organizing principle".
On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Gregor Hagedorn g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com wrote:
Term Name: Organism Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Organism Namespace: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/ Label: Organism Definition: The category of information pertaining to a specific instance of an organism (virus, symbiont, individual, colony, group of individuals, population) reliably be known to taxonomically homogeneous.
I see a problem with the "taxonomically homogeneous" since many taxa are not. All obligatory mutualistically symbiontic organisms are excluded (you mention symbiont, but the symbiont is the part of a symbiontic relation, e.g. both the algae taxon and fungus taxon each are a symbiont in a lichen.
Contradict if my German biology is at odds with English.
The problem is, that individual and set are mixed, so that the "homogeneous" appears to apply also to the individual. Proposal:
Definition: The information class pertaining to a specific instance or set of instances of a life form or organism (virus, bacteria, symbiontic life forms, individual, colony, group, population). Sets must reliably be known to taxonomically homogeneous (including obligatory symbiontic associations).
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content