Leveraging off my earlier toss-in of the parent-child collection scheme, let me toss in this observation.

I'll preface it by saying that although it's a situation we deal with in reality, my gut impulse is that it should probably _not_ be accomodated by the "Individual" concept under development.

We have many records for un- or partially-sorted lots of marine invertebrate samples. Often we can make very rough determinations of what are in those lots (e.g., we can see that a jar contains ophiuroids, gastropods, sphaeromatid isopods, red algae, and larval fish). Critically, these are multiple particular and disjunct parts of the taxonomic hierarchy, not just a single "highest containing rank" determination.

It turns out to be super-useful to record that very rough determination because (as alluded to by Rich) we can then appropriately make that jar available to visitors seeking particular taxa (and save them the trouble of grubbing through shelves of jars where we already "know" there's nothing of interest to them).

Right now, we do _not_ conflate this rough determination with a Real Taxonomic Determination (®™ and all that): they are two completely separate fields. So to find all the jars we know have ophiuroids, one does indeed have to search both the real taxonomic determination field as well as the rough-determination (text) field (if one wants to include unsorted lots in the quest).

I'm introducing this case more with the idea that it may usefully help define the outer limits for "Individual" -- something that the "Individual" concept should _not_ accomodate. I can't really wrap my head around how the developing "Individual" concept can usefully be mutilated to accomodate this case.

-Dean
--
Dean Pentcheff
pentcheff@gmail.com
dpentche@nhm.org


On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Richard Pyle <deepreef@bishopmuseum.org> wrote:
> I think if I'm understanding what John wrote,
> he was going to substitute "taxon" for "species
> (or lower taxonomic rank if it exists)" with
> the understanding that Individual is not
> intended to be used for aggregates of
> different taxa.  That would solve this problem, right?

It depends on what you mean by "different taxa".  If you are using the word
"taxa" here to imply "species or lower ranks", than I don't think it would
solve the problem.  But if you mean it in a generic way, then I'm OK with
that.  By "in a generic way", suppose I had a trawl sample or a plankton tow
sample that included unidentified organisms from multiple phyla, all of
which are animals.  I should not be prevented from representing this
aggregate as an "Individual", with an identification instances linked to a
taxon concept labelled as "Animalia".  This means the contents of the
Individual all belong to a single taxon (Animalia), and therefore it does
not violate the condition excluding aggregates of different taxa. An
instance of Individual so identified would be almost useless for many
purposes, I agree -- but it's easy enough to filter such Individuals out by
looking at dwc:taxonRank of the Taxon to which the Individual was
identified. Also, it's not useless for all purposes, because a botanist
would like to know that s/he doesn't have to look through that sample to
find stuff of interest.

I guess my point is, there should not be any rank-based requirement for the
implied taxon circumscription of an "Individual".

Rich


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