Paul J. Morris wrote:
Resource maintained as part of a collection sounds like a description of a collection object, "has been cataloged" does not. The vast majority of the 5 million or so collection objects in the Harvard University Herbaria have not been cataloged. The vast majority of all specimens in the stratigraphic portions of paleontological collections have not been cataloged. A heirarchical collection object consisting of a dry snail shell with one catalog number in one collection and soft parts in ethanol with a separate catalog number in another collection isn't is also problematic for associating a collection object with cataloged items. Botanical duplicates likewise.
Well, we may be talking past each other here if we have different understandings about what it means for something to be cataloged. But I would assert that any of the 5 million uncatalogued items in the Harvard University Herbaria are not relevant to Darwin Core in their present state because Darwin Core is a scheme for organizing metadata. How are you going to organize metadata for an item that has no database record/has not been cataloged? If you look at the terms that John is suggesting fall under the category of CollectionItem (i.e. properties of collection items), they are things like catalogNumber, disposition, otherCatalogNumbers, collectionObjectID, etc. These are properties of things which have been cataloged and and have a record in a database. You can't assign those properties to herbarium sheets that have no records in a database. In other words, the purpose of creating the class CollectionObject is not to describe the idea of what a collection object is, but rather to organize metadata for things that HAVE recorded metadata. No metadata, no reason for DwC to deal with it.
I'm not understanding your issue with separate parts or duplicates. If each one has it's own record, then each one is a separate instance of CollectionObject. They could be related to each other or the organism from which they came by properties like dcterms:hasPart, dcterms:isPartOf, or dsw:derivedFrom
Field notes, publications, and digital images fall outside the scope of the meaning of collection object.
Maybe we need a different name for the class if this is an impediment to too many people.
(Though digital images might be derived objects derived from a collection object through a digital imaging preparation process). Field notes tend to be seen as metadata about the collecting event, though they might be the only source of information about other observations.
Voucher is perhaps a better term for the broader concept.
Again, I'm repeating something I said on the list earlier, but I've been chided by some botanists for collecting images of live plants without collecting "vouchers". In that context, the person who scolded me intended for the term "voucher" to only include physical parts of a plant, and not images - a narrower concept than what John has in his definition. So we would run into the same problem of people having a preconceived idea of what "voucher" means that would basically be the same as what you are asserting "CollectionObject" means.
Steve