I’m glad to see this conversation re-vitalized, as we (Rob Whitton & I) have been thinking a lot about this in our recent discussions concerning BiSciCol, GNUB, etc. I’m on coffee break from virtual attendance at a conference right now, so no time to elaborate, except I think it would be dangerous to accommodate an occurrence as a “species” (or any taxon concept) at a place/time. I know there are plenty of data that effectively are represented as Taxon-at-Event (i.e., occurrence of a taxon at a place and time). However, I think these should all be framed as “Individual-at-Event”, even if “Individual” is nothing more than a GUID to which Taxon identifications can be linked.
I totally agree! An individual is NOT a taxon. It just belongs to one so we need to focus our attention on individual-at-event type of assertions. That individual is linked to a TaxonName which represents a TaxonConcept. Why do we need to talk about species at all? All we have to deal with is individuals, taxon names, and taxon concepts.
I think the hardest part will be to define the allowable scope of “Individual”. In my mind, it should at least span from single organism to multiple organisms up to colony and population; and can be circumscribed by any taxon concept (including “Life”). I have been re-thinking whether “part” should be treated as a separate individual. I used to think yes, but lately I’ve been thinking no.
I also agreed that an individual doesn't have to be whole, so in my opinion "parts" can also be considered 'the individual in question'. Similarly, I also agree that up to populations we can still talk about individuals. However, it is important to be able to link "parts" to the whole individuals if needed, e.g. is_part_of.
Nico
From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Peter DeVries Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2011 9:24 AM To: Nico Cellinese Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org List; Paul Murray Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] DwC Occurrence [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]
Hi Nico,
Wouldn't the individual be asserted to be an instance of a species "concept"
For instance:
The species concept http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/ICmLC#Species
An individual of that species concept http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/ICmLC#Individual
An occurrence that has been asserted to be an occurrence of that species http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/f522444a-2dd9-400e-be59-47213ef38cb9#Occurre...
Which is documented by this page http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/f522444a-2dd9-400e-be59-47213ef38cb9.html
Relationships between these entities can be browsed via the Knowledge Base view.
< http://lsd.taxonconcept.org/describe/?url=http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/f5... >
bit.ly http://bit.ly/jgRUxv
- Note that links on the HTML page will also take you to the views of the different entities in the Knowledge Base.
Also note that someone else could assert that the individual butterfly is actually an instance of a different species concept. One could simply replace these assertions with their own in a separate mapping file, or with a different predicate. Note the hypothetical links below don't work.
The individual http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/f522444a-2dd9-400e-be59-47213ef38cb9#Individ...
http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/f522444a-2dd9-400e-be59-47213ef38cb9#Individual bioimages:individualHasStevesSpeciesConcept http://lod.bioimages.org/ses/123123#Species
- We might miss some species occurrence records when we do this, so it would be best to avoid creating a number of basically duplicate concepts especially if they not the same "kind" of concept. For instance those that are linked to a specific name or classification hierarchy.
Respectfully,
- Pete
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 6:10 AM, Nico Cellinese ncellinese@flmnh.ufl.edu wrote: I personally like this nicely refined suggestion but to be honest, I can also live with the others previously made. What I don't seem to be able to digest is the notion that same individual will later be equaled by some to a species. That assertion is hard to swallow.
Nico
On May 31, 2011, at 3:44 AM, Paul Murray wrote:
An Occurrence is a combination of an Individual and an Event. An Occurrence is a coupling of an Individual and an Event. An Occurrence is a pairing of an Individual and an Event.
How about: An Occurrence is the reification of an individual's involvement in (entaglement with? presence at? relationship to?) an event. It reifies an "Event involvesIndividual Individual" fact.
The need for this construct is that we often need to say a number of additional things about an individual's involvement with (presence at) an event beyond simply assertin that there is some relationship. We need to say what tokens that individual left, what role that individual had (Predator? Prey? Parasite?), perhaps temporal or other limits of that particular individual at the event. Occurrence is the object to which these facts may be attached. An individual might meaningfully have more than one occurrence at an event - particularly in cases where events are part-of larger events, or where an individual somehow has multiple roles (hyenas chased away from their kill by a lion - or is it the other way around?).
To put it another way: "reification" = "tuple" = "association table" = "pulling a property out into an object". More or less.
To put it another another way, an Occurence object stands in relation to an event and an individual much as a TaxonRelationship object stands in relation to the two taxa it mentions. Youcould simply model taxonomy with a "hasSubtaxon" predicate, but we usually need to say a great deal more about taxonomic relationships than that.
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Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 Email: pdevries@wisc.edu TaxonConcept & GeoSpecies Knowledge Bases A Semantic Web, Linked Open Data Project