Thanks, Cam -- this is helpful.
Again, for a diagram, please refer to the image on:
http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/
Steve and I used `Token' as the class name for anything that provides evidence of a dwc:Occurrence. The Token could be an image, a dried specimen, or...
OK, I think that answers my question, then. It's intended as evidence of the Occurrence of an Organism at a Place & time (=Event), not simply evidence that the organism exists/existed. In that case, yes: Evidence is quite distinct from Organism. I guess I was thinking too much in terms of specimen, where the evidence *is* the organism. I guess there may be other forms of Evidence as well, such as an electronic tracking tag attached to an organism. This sort of evidence would not help identify the taxon of the organism (as an image and specimen would), but it would certainly represent evidence of an Organism at a place & time. But I see in your diagram (took me ten minutes to open that page from here), that you have a relationship between Token and Identification. I'm assuming that's not a mandatory relationship -- i.e., it would only apply to the subset of Tokens (Evidence instances) that provide taxonomically useful information (which an electronic tracking tag would not).
Also, does a literature citation of a particular organism at a particular place/time constitute a form of Evidence? Or is that simply captured as an Occurrence, without any tangible evidence (as, I imagine, an Observation would be captured)?
... an Observation. I see a literature citation as documentation of an Observation, which provides evidence for an occurrence. If we wanted to integrate Darwin-SW, or even DwC with existing observational ontologies (e.g. OBOE, https://semtools.ecoinformatics.org/oboe), we could allow an oboe:Observation to also be a Token, providing evidence for a dwc:Occurrence.
OK, I can see that. A literature citation could include an image, and could include reference to a specimen, but I suppose in that case the image and the specimen would then each stand alone as their own instance of Evidence (independent of the literature citation), in which case the literature citation becomes effectively the same as a specimen label or a slip of paper documenting an observation record (i.e., Documentation of Evidence, rather than Evidence per se).
Please see the discussion of Token at:
Alas, my internet connection is too slow, so I'll look at it when I get home. You've certainly cleared up my confusion with respect to the respective roles of Evidence and Organism [=Individual], and I fully agree they are fundamentally different.
Aloha, Rich